UPDATE—May 25: Augustinus Bader products almost never go on sale, but right now there’s a major exception. Thanks to Shopbop’s massive Memorial Day sale, you can score every celebrity’s go-to skin care for 15% off with code BEAUTY15—but only for a limited time. Everything from Augustinus Bader is on sale, so start with the Cream, then check out other favorites like the Essence, the Hair Oil, and the Body Cream. Happy Memorial Day, indeed.
Augustinus Bader The Cream
Augustinus Bader The Rich Cream
ORIGINAL STORY: The most raved-about secret in beauty this year wasn’t a magic facialist or a Real Housewife–lauded injection—it was Augustinus Bader The Cream, an unassuming moisturizer made by a 60-year-old German scientist who’d never worked in the industry, let alone had an Instagram following. And yet despite having none of the traditional resources that make a beauty brand an overnight success—like paid celebrity spokespeople, million-dollar ad campaigns, or millennial-pink packaging—Augustinus Bader became a sleeper hit purely through word of mouth.
In the two years since it launched, AB’s “miracle cream” has gotten accolades from Ashley Graham, Kate Bosworth, and Victoria Beckham (who’s since launched a moisturizing primer with the brand). Glamour even gave it a Beauty Award for Best Moisturizer, a highly competitive category, as you can surely imagine. So before I even uncapped the weighty blue-and-copper tube of its famed Cream, which costs a cool $280 for 50 ml, I was basically set to fall in love with it—price tag be damned.
Augustinus Bader The Cream
Augustinus Bader The Rich Cream
But the only kind of hype I pay real attention to is beauty-editor hype; if my product-inundated colleagues are raving about it, I figure it has to stand out from the pack. And for weeks every single editor I knew had told me about the cream in a tone I can only describe as reverent. I was ready to experience my own Bader-sparked miracle.
Bizarrely, I didn’t immediately fall head over heels for it (don’t worry, a second plot twist will follow shortly). Sure, it was a good face cream. The light texture absorbed quickly and my skin looked decent, but it didn’t exactly wow me. I felt like a thin layer just wasn’t doing much in the moisturizing department—which, apparently, I later learned, isn’t even what The Cream claims to do. It’s more of an overall skin rejuvenator; the brand also sells a Rich Cream for dry skin, with additions like avocado and argan oil to aid with extra hydration. But I began with the original, thinking it’d be enough.
In order to get maximum effectiveness from the active ingredients, I did what a few other friends and makeup artists had advised and skipped all other products, except face wash. The Bader formula is based on TFC8 (Trigger Factor Complex 8), a proprietary cocktail of more than 40 different ingredients, including vitamins and amino acids. It’s meant to encourage regeneration and healing—Professor Bader actually discovered the formula while looking for solutions to help burn survivors heal quicker—and TFC8 is supposed to activate your stem cells, which go to work to repair fine lines, dark spots, and visible pores. I had heard that the ingredients within were enough to replace all other skin care, so I devoted myself to a one-step kind of lifestyle and waited for my skin to start looking like I had just walked out of a spa. And then I waited some more….
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