On the coast of Aveiro, Lusipure sources Codium tomentosum, the siphonous alga of the Atlantic. It is not collected from the shoreline. It is farmed, in an exclusive certified organic marine cultivation programme, in cycles of 11 to 15 weeks.

The distinction between collecting and farming is the whole point of this article.

Why farm an alga that grows on its own

Wild harvesting has an obvious appeal in a brand story and three problems in practice.

• It depends on a resource nobody manages. Demand rises, the shoreline does not.
• It varies. Composition shifts with the season, the water and the spot, and a formula cannot absorb that variation indefinitely.
• It is hard to trace. A batch that cannot be traced cannot be audited.

Cultivation answers all three. It sets the cycle, it makes the composition reproducible, and it produces a batch with a documented history. It costs more and it takes longer, which is presumably why it is rare.

What the alga carries

Codium tomentosum behaves like a marine sponge for minerals, amino acids and polysaccharides. Those are the components that interest a formulator: minerals for the skin's exchanges, amino acids as building blocks, polysaccharides for their capacity to hold water at the surface.

In its raw state, none of that is directly usable. The alga has to be transformed.

Fermentation, and a vitamin the alga makes itself

The transformation runs through marine biotechnology: a fermentation via holobiont with Exiguobacterium marinum, a bacterium that lives in association with the alga rather than against it.

What comes out of that fermentation is an active that naturally produces endogenous vitamin B5. Vitamin B5 is familiar in skincare under its synthetic form, D-panthenol. Here it is not added at the end of the formula. It is produced by the biological system itself, which makes it a biotechnological alternative to the synthetic route rather than a substitute ingredient.

That active sits alongside the olive leaf extract in Ydrixcell™. A purified marine polysaccharide, an Atlantic seaweed extract and triple molecular weight hyaluronic acid form the second complex, Trihelixsea™.

Land and ocean, on purpose

Lusipure has two raw material origins and they were not chosen for symmetry. The olive leaf of Trás-os-Montes brings polyphenols and protection against oxidative stress. The Atlantic algae of Aveiro brings minerals, amino acids and water retention. One does not replace the other, and neither of them is a story about a coastline.

Both go through the same route: a certified organic raw material, a documented transformation, and a formula that is then evaluated on its own results.