In 2016, before Aune had a name, Inês was walking the coastal path above Guincho and stopped at a plant she had eaten in a restaurant in Ericeira the week before: sea fennel, pickled, with grilled fish. Here it was, growing out of a crack in the rock with nothing to drink but spray.
A plant built for exposure
Plants that live on sea cliffs deal with everything skin deals with on a summer day: salt, UV, wind and drought. Sea fennel’s answer is a fleshy, waxy leaf packed with vitamin C, chlorogenic acid and carotenoids. That combination is what we wanted in a brightening serum that would not sting.
The first trials were not good. A simple extract went brown within days. It took our formulator eleven months, and a lot of advice from an older chemist in Porto, to find an extraction and a pH where the actives stayed stable, and to pair them with 5% niacinamide so the serum did more than one thing.
Fresh sea fennel sprigs in a jar of water on a windowsill.
It had no business growing there, and it was thriving.
Picking it properly
Wild sea fennel is not endangered, but cliff plants are slow to recover. We work under a municipal licence, pick only from May to July, take no more than a third of any plant, and never from the same stretch two years running. A grower in Sintra now cultivates most of what we use, which keeps the wild cliffs mostly for walkers.
Sea Fennel Serum was Nº 04 when it left the lab in 2017 and it is still the formula people reorder most. The fennel also went into our toner as steam-distilled water, and the seeds became the oil in Nº 07.
