Dr Barbara Sturm and her skincare line: 6 things to know
“I’m the Mother of customised skincare,” declares Dr Barbara Sturm, the German orthopaedic surgeon-turned anti-ageing skin expert. Instead of sounding arrogant, she is actually just matter-of-fact. The doctor is after all, the word-of-mouth go-to for some of the most beautiful and ageless in Hollywood, young and older: from Cher and Jennifer Aniston to Rosie Huntington-Whitley, Irina Shayk and Hailey Baldwin. In 2003, she pioneered a method that uses one’s blood for a customised anti-ageing face cream, the MC1 or “Blood Cream”. In a nutshell, here’s how it works: she puts a vial of your blood through a “mechanical stimulation” process to trick the cells into thinking that it needs to produce wound-healing proteins. “The resulting concentration of anti interleukin-1 and transforming growth factor (TGF) beta is 140 times higher than what you would have in the body,” says Dr Sturm. She adds the concentration into a tub of moisturiser, and there is the customised face cream. (Primarily, the use of your own blood is for hygiene purposes.) The doctor created the MC1 when she was …

