Best skin moisturizer: Monoï oil

Forget kids in candy stores—nothing, in my experience, can rival the joy and awe of grown women preparing to purchase armfuls of beautifully packaged coconut oil. Giggling with glee, Carol’s Daughter founder Lisa Price and I are perusing the shelves of a small gift shop attached to the Parfumerie Tiki factory in Papeete, Tahiti. We’re grabbing everything we see, sticking our noses in bottle after bottle, grinning like drunks. This isn’t, however, just any coconut oil or suntan-lotion-scented imposter that’s sending us into such raptures—this is real monoï: a swoon-inducingly fragrant concoction made by steeping tiare flowers, a variety of gardenia indigenous to French Polynesia, in locally sourced coconut oil. Price and I both have special attachments to the stuff: I visited Tahiti for the first time in 2005, physically and emotionally scarred by a double whammy of major surgery and a bad breakup, and found, in the paradisiacal island and the oil, a balm for both. Price had been fascinated by the purported beautifying properties of monoï for many years before introducing the ingredient in Carol’s Daughter’s recently launched Monoï Repairing Collection (featuring a shampoo, conditioner, and hair mask). When you stumble across a multitasking moisturizer said to deliver shiny, frizz-free hair and soft, glowy skin—and, in a single drop, an olfactive vacation—it’s hard not to become obsessed. South Pacific islanders have used monoï, which means “sacred oil,” for centuries. It is, as Price says, “their Vaseline”: They douse themselves with it daily from head to toe to protect their skin and hair from the drying effects of salt water and tropical sun; they use it to calm inflammation from grazes and insect bites; pregnant women apply it to combat stretch marks; and babies are massaged with it after being born. Most families have their own monoï recipes, many of them spiked with additional aromatics such as ylang-ylang, sandalwood, vanilla, and basil (the last, a local woman tells me, is a savory concoction worn to ward off “evil spirits and unwanted suitors,” which, really, could be one and the same). At Parfumerie Tiki—the oldest commercial producer of monoï in Tahiti, established in 1942—the oil has been incorporated into a variety of products, ranging from soap and body wash to bath salts, shampoo, perfume spray, and even bug repellent. Like those of several ancient botanical-based beauty boosters favored in far-flung locales, many of monoï’s fabled benefits have been scientifically substantiated in recent years. The flowers contain high levels of methyl salicylate, known for its purifying and anti-inflammatory qualities (it’s related to salicylic acid, from which aspirin and many acne treatments are derived), and during the typically 15-day maceration, those active properties are transferred to the oil. While any coconut oil is an effective moisturizer for skin and frazzled strands—it protects the skin’s lipid barrier and easily penetrates hair follicles, preventing protein and water loss—the coral-island-grown coconuts used for monoï have superpowers: They contain additional protein and produce a silkier, less greasy oil than those grown elsewhere. It’s a happy alchemy. “I initially wanted to use monoï simply because I loved the smell and the fact that it came from French Polynesia,” Price says, “but when we ran clinical tests on the Repair Collection products, they came back with astounding results—far better than I could have hoped for.” Indeed, Carol’s Daughter found that after only a onetime use of the shampoo and hair mask, hair breakage was reduced by 96 percent. And in a stretch-pull test, which simulates normal wear and tear, non-monoï-treated hair snapped after 10,000 pulls, while monoï-treated strands lasted through 130,000 pulls. With results such as that, it’s little surprise that a whole host of cosmetics companies are pitching their beach umbrellas on the same stretch of tropical sand: Monoï is cropping up in everything from bronzers to lipsticks to anti-aging creams. (There’s some evidence that it has a firming effect on the skin—women who participated in a small study conducted by the Institut du Monoï, a nonprofit founded by the Tahitian government to promote the wonder oil, showed a 27 percent increase in elasticity over 28 days of use.) One monoï pioneer was the founder and creative director of Nars Cosmetics, François Nars, who, after visiting Tahiti in the ’90s, was so besotted with the region’s exotic charms that, in 1998, he introduced Nars Body Glow, a shimmer-infused monoï-based head-to-toe moisturizer. (He also bought his own island near Bora Bora.) For Nars, it wasn’t just the “soothing, moisturizing, and protective benefits of the oil, all of which I love,” he says; it was the fact that its voluptuous scent reminded him so vividly of his home away from home. “I have 60 or 70 tiare bushes in my garden, and the smell of the flowers follows you as you walk along the beach at night. It’s just incredible.” Eric Vaxelaire, the Institut du Monoï’s charismatic French-born director, echoes Nars’ sentiment as he drives Price and me past a tiare plantation, where the snow-white blossoms dot the landscape like stars. The heart of monoï’s appeal, he believes, is simple: It’s paradise in a bottle. “It creates a very strong, positive emotional response in people,” he says, “like Tahiti itself.” Because its prime ingredients can’t be produced anywhere else, monoï is imbued with an indelible sense of place: To use it is to sample the legendary sybaritic delights of the South Pacific, to be transported, in a sense, to its remote aquamarine lagoons and majestic volcanic peaks. I remember the sweet serenity I felt every time I opened the bottle I brought home from my first visit—it was as if the honking cars outside my Manhattan window dissolved, momentarily, into crashing waves. That it also imparted an island-goddess radiance to my skin and hair was just a bonus.