If you've bought an antioxidant for your skin, it was almost certainly vitamin C. It has earned that position. Decades of research show it helps defend skin against environmental damage, supports brightness, and plays a part in how skin makes collagen.
It also has a problem that everyone who has owned a bottle knows about. It doesn't last.
Why vitamin C is hard to live with
Vitamin C in its purest form, L-ascorbic acid, is unstable. It reacts with water, air and light. It needs a low pH to stay active, which is why so many vitamin C serums sting. And it oxidises steadily from the day you open it, turning from clear to yellow to orange as it loses its power. The formulation science has improved, with gentler derivatives and airless packaging, but the trade-off hasn't gone away. The most active forms are the least stable, and the most stable forms are the least active.
That isn't a reason to abandon vitamin C. It's a reason to ask what else is available.
What astaxanthin is
Astaxanthin is a red pigment made by microalgae. It's the reason salmon flesh and flamingo feathers are pink, and it's one of the most studied antioxidants in nature. In the laboratory, it's exceptional at neutralising singlet oxygen, one of the most damaging forms of oxidative stress that sunlight creates in skin.
Two things make it different from vitamin C, and both matter.
It's fat-soluble. Vitamin C is water-soluble, so it works in the watery spaces of skin. Astaxanthin dissolves in fat, so it sits inside the lipid membranes that surround every cell and inside the oily layers of the barrier. That's where a great deal of daily oxidative damage happens, and it's territory vitamin C doesn't cover.
It's stable in a cream. Astaxanthin doesn't oxidise in water the way vitamin C does, and it doesn't need an acidic formula to stay active. It can sit in a rich daily moisturiser and still be doing its job at the end of the tube.
Why we built our day cream around it
Your skin is built from proteins. Collagen for structure, elastin for spring, keratin for resilience, and thousands of enzymes and messengers keeping the system running. Together they're your skin's proteome, and it's where our research begins. Oxidative stress from pollution and sunlight damages those proteins, and that damage is what ageing looks like from the inside.
A day cream has one job in that story: defence. So we chose the antioxidant best suited to a full day in the environment, not the one with the biggest reputation.
The Tripeptide Antioxidant Day Cream carries astaxanthin from Haematococcus pluvialis, the microalga that makes it in the highest concentrations found in nature. It gives the cream its coral tint, which disappears as it absorbs. Alongside it, an extremophile ferment adds a second layer of antioxidant defence and hydration, and a biomimetic tripeptide calms the look of visible redness.
We tested the cream in living human skin samples exposed to urban pollution and UV-A in the laboratory, measuring the oxidative damage to skin's proteins with and without the formula. The serum was tested the same way.
Do you still need vitamin C?
Possibly. If you use a vitamin C serum you love, keep it. Vitamin C and astaxanthin work in different parts of the skin, and there's a good case for both. What you don't need is to rely on an antioxidant that has lost half its strength by the time you reach the bottom of the bottle.
One thing the day cream isn't: a sunscreen. It helps defend against the effects of environmental stress, but it doesn't block UV. Wear a broad-spectrum SPF over it every morning.