Marie Veronique’s All Day Age Delay Emulsion is this beloved Berkeley-based brand’s first-ever creamy daytime moisturizer. With bakuchiol, carnosine, spirulina maxima, and postbiotics, it’s designed to promote overall skin health and delay premature signs of aging — especially wrinkles and hyperpigmentation — around the clock. Its lightweight texture works beautifully as a top layer over serums and oils.

When we first heard about it, we were (as always) full of both excitement and questions. Check out Dara’s interview with Marie below, where this wonderful formulator gives us an insider’s peek into her creative process and this beautiful product.

Dara: First, I wanted to ask you about texture in general, because All Day Age Delay is now the third emulsion you have on your shelves. For a long time, many of us thought of Marie Veronique as an oils-only product range. I'd love to hear more about this exciting new emulsion path you're blazing! Why are you into emulsions these days?

MARIE VERONIQUE: You’re right, we’ve always been more into oils and serums—my reasoning being that serums deliver the actives to the deeper layers of the skin, while oils restore and maintain barrier efficiency. But emulsions add an extra dimension to the skin care routine that becomes more important as skin ages. Emulsions are thicker than serums but still able to deliver concentrated actives to the deeper layers of skin, i.e., the dermis. They are also lighter than oil blends and restore barrier function by contributing, not just to the barrier’s lipid matrix, but also to its hydration matrix with humectants. With emulsions you get to combine the best of all worlds; state-of the-art actives, lipids and humectants in an ideal medium that can also go long on longevity.  Now that my main focus is age delay skin care it makes sense that I tend to use the emulsion advantage whenever possible—as I get older, my formulations trend more and more in the direction of addressing the needs of older skin. 

Dara: When we talked about oils vs creams a few years ago, you raised a few concerns with emulsions: a) they often require higher amounts of preservatives (since they tend to be high in water content), and b) the waxy portion of emulsion formulas can sometimes lead  to clogged pores or even inhibit the skin's self-hydrating system. How were you able to mitigate these concerns with your formulas?

MARIE: You always ask the questions formulators only dream of being asked. Thanks for that. It’s precisely those challenges that held me back, but these are also the concerns skin care scientists needed to address in order to make the leap into skin science. Happily, emulsification science has gotten much more sophisticated since the bad old days of beeswax. These days we have a much wider range of biopolymeric emulsifiers to choose from, in case you want to make a gel. For creams my special favorites are the liquid crystal emulsions which form layered or lamellar structures which mimic the stratum corneum. These bilayers retain water to create flexible viscoelastic systems that are also stable, thus capable of releasing actives slowly.  These novel emulsifications provide everything an aging, barrier-compromised skin needs to function properly; in essence adding a few extra nanometers to the top layer of your SC. 

Preservation science has come a long way as well.  We like natural preservatives like leuconostoc/radish root ferment filtrate.  In addition, we keep water content low, since water is the number one source of microorganism contamination.  

Dara: You typically suggest applying ADAD on top of an oil, and "what's the order of events?" is always one of our most frequently asked questions. Can you tell us why this order tends to work best?

MARIE: From an application standpoint, serums are typically applied earlier in one’s routine—usually after cleansing. I usually apply them in the order of serums and then oils, with the last step being the emulsion/moisturizer.  Emulsions are thicker than oils and serums, so it will do the best job at preventing TEWL when applied last.  I think of it as stratum corneum biomimicry—you just add layers in conformance with skin architecture, with the stratum corneum being the topmost layer, hence the one that best prevents TEWL.

Dara: What are some other questions or topics that you're tussling with these days?

MARIE: Of course we’re into age delay skin care (like everyone else), but unlike almost everyone else we’re ahead of the curve because we started early.  Here are two hints about what we’re working on.

After emulsions, the next step in the combatting-dry-skin logical progression would be balms.  People with very dry skin tell me oils and serums and even emulsions no longer do the job—so the next in line would be heavy duty occlusives.  Balms are protective but also have other properties.

Longevity actives such as senomorphics like Vitamin C are used commonly these days.  But you’ll recall that it took years of research with ascorbic acid before we had derivatives that were stable and converted to ascorbic acid without causing irritation.  We’re now in the same boat with senotherapeutics in the senolytic category—these mostly bioflavonoid ingredients deliver longevity results like you’ve never seen, but they are maddeningly unstable.  These days skin science is heavily into skin longevity, the last frontier, and many of us are tackling the challenges presented by these wonderful but elusive flavonoids.  They remind me of shy, mad little geniuses—you know you could get so much out of them if you could just persuade them to come out of hiding. 

Dara: All Day Age Delay is a wonderful way of bringing your Skin Longevity Explored Substack to life — it addresses all the major hallmarks of aging with its ingredients, which we'll describe in our product summary. What is the most important thing you want people to know about it? And is there something about it that you think tends to get overlooked? 

MARIE: What I’ve been tussling with formulaically segues nicely here with skin longevity as a concept. ADAD is the first in our line of skin longevity products. There will be more.  As well as making products I write about them, why?--well, I suppose because someone has to.

At the risk of repeating myself (I tend go on at length about the subject in the introduction) I write about skin longevity because it tends to get overlooked by “serious” scientists hot on the trail of extending efficient cognitive function to centenarians (well naturally, they’re scientists).  What they miss is that skin longevity is very important to almost everyone because we, and even the scientists among us, are hard-wired to care.  Longevity skin care increases the quality of our extended life span—so it’s not vanity, and it’s not trivial. In my field the twelve hallmarks are a very helpful foundation to begin the work of developing products and techniques that extend life span and health span of the skin as well as body (and in addition to the brain).  These days healthy skinspan extension is an achievable goal, which makes it 10^n exciting.