Lusipure takes two raw materials from the olive tree, and both come from the same place: a 300-hectare certified organic farm in Vila Flor, Trás-os-Montes, in north-east Portugal, of which 14 hectares are centuries-old trees.
The oil comes first, pressed from the fruit. It is the first ingredient in Golden Gel and the second in Essência Body Care, and it does what Portuguese olive oil has always done: soften the skin, restore its lipid film, and protect it with its own polyphenols and vitamin E.
The leaf comes second, and it is the one that needs explaining, because almost nobody uses it.
Why the leaf as well
The olive leaf concentrates oleuropein, a polyphenol that the fruit carries in far smaller proportion. Oleuropein converts in situ into hydroxytyrosol, an antioxidant that measures several times more powerful than vitamin E in ORAC testing. For an active ingredient, that is the interesting molecule, and the leaf is where it lives.
For a long time the leaf was simply what was left once the olives had been picked. Treating it as a raw material in its own right means that the same farm yields two ingredients, that nothing has to be planted twice, and that both can be traced back to a single hillside.
You can read that on the ingredient list. On that same product, OLEA EUROPAEA FRUIT OIL and OLEA EUROPAEA LEAF EXTRACT sit a few lines apart, both marked as organic. Same tree, same hillside, two entirely different processes.
Ozone instead of chemistry
Between the tree and the extraction there is a step that most sourcing stories skip: the leaves have to be sanitised.
The usual route is a chemical treatment. Ours is a foliar ozone (O₃) treatment, applied to the leaf before extraction. Ozone is unstable. It reverts to oxygen and leaves nothing behind, so there is no residue to rinse, neutralise or declare. As far as we know, this process is unique in Portuguese cosmetics.
The practical consequence matters more than the novelty. A leaf that has not been chemically treated arrives at the laboratory with its bioactive compounds intact, and the extraction can be judged on its own terms rather than on what it has to correct.
From the grove to the active ingredient
The leaf then leaves agriculture and enters biotechnology. Extraction and characterisation are carried out with specialised European laboratories, using supercritical fluid extraction and membrane filtration, with molecular characterisation by transcriptomic screening. The point of that sequence is preservation: the more selective the extraction, the less of the plant you have to destroy to reach the molecule you want.
What comes out is the olive leaf extract at the heart of Ydrixcell™, our repairing and nourishing complex, which is built entirely on certified organic Portuguese sourcing.
What this is, and what it is not
Origin is a sourcing decision. It tells you where a raw material comes from, how it was grown and how it was treated. It does not, by itself, tell you what a finished cream does on skin.
Those are two different questions, and we keep them apart on purpose. Vila Flor answers the first one. The second is answered by measurement, and we write about that separately.