Meet SkingenecellEnmei, the 'life-giving' ingredient in Shiseido's Future Solution LX skincare range.
“Why are you visiting Japan?” enquired the elderly officer politely at the immigration queue. We mentioned that we were there on the invitation of Shiseido. “Ah! Shiseido-neh? Please, write here! Dozo! Dozo!” We dutifully penned “Shiseido” on our arrival card and with that endorsement, we cleared immigration smoothly.
We had just touched down in Nagoya, and already we found that the Shiseido name is much revered in its home country. The cosmetics and skincare giant employs some 36,500 staff in Japan, and is a respected company known for hiring some of the best researchers and scientists in the country.
Of its 700 scientists, 300 are women. And on this trip, I was invited to meet Eriko Kawai, the research scientist responsible for the discovery of a new ingredient that would lead to a remarkable formulation change in the brand’s Future Solution LX skincare range—SkingenecellEnmei.
Life-Giving Force
It has taken Shiseido researchers eight years to work on the formulation of this new ingredient and to incorporate it into its most premium skincare range, the Future Solution LX. Kawai revealed over dinner that her work on researching this new ingredient started even before the Future Solution LX was launched in 2009 and that her husband, also a scientist at the Shiseido Laboratories, is already working with a team on a third formulation of the product for a future launch. This offers a glimpse into the progressiveness Shiseido adopts towards its research; something the beauty house has always been proud of.
Kawai’s discovery, as with most of Shiseido’s groundbreaking work, is drawn from nature—from the leaf of the healing herb Enmei. Drunk as a tea and used in traditional Chinese medicine, this leaf has energising properties and is said to calm the body as well. Still, it begs the question why, among so many plants and herbs in the world, Kawai and her team decided to focus on researching the benefits of this particular plant when its existence and efficacy is little known outside of Japan.
To unveil the properties and peerless supremacy of the Enmei plant, Shiseido hosted a global media launch in Nagoya—including a visit to the Ise Shrine where we were taught the life-giving and healing powers of nature, and to the sacred Buddhist temple of Kobo Daishi in Mount Koya where the Enmei herb has a legendary history.