M Picaut is one of the best selling skincare brands in Sweden, where it’s featured in luxury spas, skincare clinics, and basically every magazine; it also consistently wins the country’s coveted beauty awards year after year to its unusual focus on results.

Its founder, Mette Picaut — a former model with extensive training in Traditional Chinese Medicine as well as Western medicine — worked with gifted formulators to pack her products with the maximum amount of age-preserving ingredients, blended with botanicals like sea buckthorn and more intriguing additions like gemstones. They’ve been favorites among our most particular dry-skinned clients ever since 2016, who tend to buy them over and over.

This loyalty may be explained by the fact that Mette truly went above and beyond to make sure her products look and feel like a dream. The youth-preserving oils don’t seem “oily”; the moisturizing creams and barrier-repairing balm melt into skin like butter; the nourishing cleanser feels plush and leaves skin velvety-soft. In the beauty business, such formulas are described as “cosmetically elegant.” In our view, it doesn’t get more elegant than this.

The other thing we love about this brand? Behind it, you’ll find the most wonderful people. Mette created the brand and ran the business on her own for some time, but after winning several prestigious beauty awards, the company grew to a size that was large enough to require more managers — so her husband, Eric has now joined M Picaut, making it a model family business.

(The couple, pictured above, met at the height of their respective international modeling careers in the 1990s, and they still model from time to time. FYI, they’re in their mid-fifties. Obviously, you need to try these products if you haven’t already.)

Dara’s family visited theirs in Sweden a few years ago, and in addition to being gorgeous, the Picauts are as lovely as can be. Mette even arranged a horseback ride for the kids: one of her first memories was of being on a horse, and she thought it would be delightful if their horseback ride could help Dara’s children remember their trip to Sweden forever.

What Dara also remembered was how healthfully Mette ate, so we also thought we’d share how Mette keeps her skin, body, and spirit healthy through the long Swedish winter. Click here for Mette’s secrets to gamely marching through the long, dark Swedish winters —with the promise of gloriously long, warm summer days on the other side.