"SkinCream" news and stories

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.

A Japanese sake company noticed that its master brewers always had such nice skin! So Ozeki asked 11 employees to drink sake (270 millileters, to be exact) and measure the moisture in their skin before and after. Moisture content of their arms grew by 30%, compared to no change when drinking another alcoholic beverage.

The employees may have gotten sloshed, but it was for a good cause! Now several Japanese companies are developing sake-based skincare products. Evidently, there are 36 active substances in the sake-derived extracts produced by Yushin-Brewer, which contains koji mold, lactic acid bacteria and yeast. Yushin-Brewer is also making an anti-ulcer product. And I have no idea how that relates to having moist skin, but there you go.

I think I'd rather just get the lovely skin effects from drinking the sake. You?

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