Why Is This So Expensive?: La Prairie Caviar Cream Luxe

In our new series, Why Is This So Expensive?, we explore the luxury products we love and exactly what you're paying for. Up first? La Prairie's, Caviar Premier, which retails for $485 .

When one thinks of La Prairie, they think of caviar. The luxury Swiss skincare brand capitalized on the intriguing ingredient back in 1987 with its debut caviar product, Skin Caviar Dermo Beads. The brand has since expanded into a whole caviar collection, including a sleep mask, body cream, and even a cushion compact foundation. Now, La Prairie is debuting Caviar Premier, a "remastered" take on the original caviar formula. The Skin Caviar Luxe Cream retails for $485 for 50ml or, if you really want to douse yourself, $880 for 100ml. Why does it cost so much? I asked the team who created it to find out.

Dr. Daniel Stangl, La Prairie's director of innovation who leads product development, says the company's past 30 years of research has shown them caviar extract has "firming, lifting, volumizing benefits, and gives back that elasticity to the skin." He continues, "It really works on the skin's extracellular matrix, all of that 'scaffold' that really gives the firmness to the skin."

On top of that, Jacqueline Hill, La Praire's director of strategic innovation and science, once told ELLE that caviar extract also enhances production of both collagen and ceramides, the naturally occurring lipids that help skin retain moisture.

Stangl says,"We have a small team. 10 to 15 people working in formula packaging development, and then it’s a small team managing all the development of exclusive active ingredients." Part of the what you're paying for is all the research that goes into maintaining what he calls the "sensorics" of the product, a.k.a. how it feels.

"Caviar premier is a mix of many, many different molecules from a chemical point of view. It's not easy to incorporate those ingredients into a formula and to keep, at the same time, the sensorics," shares Stangl. The mix of active ingredients often contradicts the ingredients needed to make the cream feel indulgent to the touch. "This is why we do dozens, sometimes hundreds of trials to reach that balance that makes the right formula," he explains.

"It goes back to what our client is, because when somebody pays, just to be very concrete, $500 or $1000 for a skincare product, they do not expect just another skincare experience," Greg Prodromides, La Praire's Chief Marketing Officer, says of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the cream. "Notice the immaterial side of luxury, the emotions you spark through the experience you just discovered—unboxing a product is a way to it."

As for the silver spatula? There's a practical reason: "If you use a spatula, you do not introduce what you have on your fingers—germs, microbes—into the cream," explains Stangl. "You could eat with your fingers—why do you use a knife and a fork? It’s a little bit similar, you know? I love the idea of a spatula. It pays a little bit of respect to the cream and also to your skin."

The little tool is also meant to prompt you into taking your sweet time with your skincare routine. This feeling is what La Prairie CEO Patrick Rasquinet emphasizes is what you're really paying for. "Luxury is about time, a moment when you just indulge yourself. In this world it’s really more and more difficult to get time, to get space, to get silence," he says. "Because everything is so easy to access, so quick, so on, that in fact to get time is becoming luxury."

If you can afford Caviar Cream Luxe, it definitely performs. Even after just using the product for one night, it revived my tired, travel-ravaged skin. The look and feel of the whole package, plus the silky feeling of the cream and the little silver spatula made my regular 'ol routine feel more like a spa treatment. That being said, it's still expensive. If you prefer the finer things in...say, designer bags and shoes, five star hotels, and food with truffle on it, then yes, this cream very much makes sense in your life.