Sunburst Trout Farm's caviar. Photo: Fred Sauceman, Flickr.

Cosmetologists have long raided the kitchen cabinet to make everything from cucumber lotion to egg white shampoo, but Sunburst Trout Farm's Sally Eason believes her new trout caviar skin cream is unprecedented.

"I always heard caviar was the best thing for your skin," says Eason, whose family has been raising mountain trout in western North Carolina since World War II. Laughing, she adds: "I'm hoping I'm going to look like I'm 22."

Caviar beauty treatments aren't new, but none of the products currently on the market are made from golden trout roe. Sunburst Trout Farm has a history of extracting value from trout eggs, having pioneered trout caviar in the early 1990s. The tangerine-hued eggs have since surfaced at ritzy restaurants and on Jacques Pépin's television show.

But in 2007, Sunburst's processing plant was destroyed by light-fingered arsonists who made off with 670 pounds of the farm's treasured roe.
All they left behind was a few cases of lesser-quality roe that Sunburst had harvested during a summer heat wave.

"For a period of four to six weeks, nothing tasted good enough for food grade," Eason recalls. "But I said 'let's not throw it away.' And then the wheels started turning."

Eason used the roe to create her first prototypes of Esther, named after the Biblical beauty. She's now perfecting the recipe for the pink-tinted moisture cream, spiked with mountain-grown lavender. "You don't want it to turn yucky and smell bad," explains Eason, who's hoping to launch the product before the holiday shopping season.

Some aestheticians believe caviar can contribute to keeping skin looking firm, smooth and youthful -- a winning trinity that, for some consumers, might very well trump all other reasons to support family farms.