Liz Earle Naturally Active Skincare blog

Plants have one thing on their mind: continuation of the species. Over millennia, they’ve evolved amazing strategies to ensure the continued success of their offspring. Lucky for us, too! Our skins benefit from these evolutionary efforts. Take vitamin E, for example. Only plants make vitamin E, and different plants make different amounts of this precious antioxidant. If you stress plants by not giving them sufficient water or providing too much sunlight, they actually make more vitamin E to protect themselves.  How much they make usually relates to their propagation strategy.

Wheat has a one-shot deal. It’s an annual, so it is dependent on the success of one year’s offspring to pass on its genes. Relying on the wind to spread its seed far and wide, evolution has eliminated a heavy, hard shell in favour of a feather-light husk (bran). Then there’s the germ – the part of a plant that grows. The wheat germ is packed with vitamin E to preserve it against nature’s assault from heat and the light of the sun. All that vitamin E ensures that the seedling is able to send the energy it makes and produce the necessary chemistry to grow. A coconut tree, on the other hand, invests a lot of effort in protecting its seed with a big fleshy fruit and a hard shell. All this physical protection means there is little need for the plant to produce vitamin E. Wheat and coconut are just two extremes of a whole range of vitamin E levels plants contain.

With its wonderful moisturising and skin-conditioning properties, vitamin E plays a huge role in our range, where you’ll find it in beauty must-haves from Superskin Moisturiser to Daily Eye Repair and almost anywhere in between. And to make sure that our skin reaps as much goodness as possible, we only use natural-source vitamin E – which is demonstrated to be between two and three times more potent than synthetically produced. Plants simply do it better…