Smarter Than Your Average Skincare Some of the most exciting innovations to hit the shelves

We often blame products for not living up to our expectations, but in reality, most people aren’t using the correct formulas for their skin concerns. Lancôme’s Skin Profiler service will have an exclusive global pre-launch at Lane Crawford, where state-of-the-art technology will be employed to determine exactly what your skin needs — and then give it exactly that.

Some beauty brands go to the highest mountains and the deepest oceans to source ingredients that resist the earth’s most extreme conditions. 111SKIN did one better and developed its products to work even in space. If you thought winters were dry, just imagine space, where radiation and a lack of gravity cause rapid ageing. 111SKIN’s NAC Y2 formula was created to fight these exact concerns, stimulating the body’s own natural repair capabilities to reverse wrinkles and lines and prevent further ageing.

Though Charlotte Tilbury is best known as a make-up artist for Hollywood’s top celebrities, her products — both skincare and cosmetics — are surprisingly high-tech. The Instant Magic Facial Dry Sheet Mask, for example, is a first-of-its-kind reusable dry mask that uses a Five Skin Solution IQ that infuses wrinkle-reducing, skin-smoothening, brightening, hydrating ingredients exactly where your skin needs them most, with a biomimetic system that releases ingredients slowly so your skin has time to soak in the good stuff. The brand’s Wonderglow Makeup Primer is also unexpectedly scientific (and cool): its fluorescent core light diffuser absorbs UV in the sunlight, re-emiting it as illumination from your skin, while soft-focus ceramic microspheres create the optical illusion of a poreless surface.

La Prairie’s scientists have broken down what they call the Equation of Light, figuring out how to combat dullness, which is caused by coloured pigments in the skin from pollution, inflammation, UV and other factors that cause the skin not to reflect light as well. Using Lumidose, a special molecule found after testing some 50,000 different others, which reduces pigmentation and allows the skin to reflect light better, its White Caviar Crème Extraordinaire can make you glow like nobody’s business, without the use of make-up.