Where Every Formula Begins With an Ancestral Remedy

On a 13th-century court, and the Ancestral Science™ of remedies that travel

In the early 1200s, an English monk named Matthew Paris gave the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II a nickname: Stupor Mundi, the wonder of the world. Paris wasn’t writing about Frederick’s armies. He meant his curiosity. From his court in Sicily, Frederick collected minds the way other rulers collected land. Arab astronomers, Jewish physicians, Greek translators and Latin scholars worked under one roof, turning texts from one language into another. Knowledge that had been scattered across the Mediterranean was gathered in a single place and put to use.

The stone of the wise

Among them was Michael Scot, a Scottish scholar who translated Arabic works of natural philosophy into Latin. Later writers also attached his name to treatises on alchemy, the long European search for the lapis philosophorum, the philosopher’s stone: a single substance said to transform and restore. In German, it has another name: der Stein der Weisen.

Frederick was not a man who took old knowledge on faith. In his book on falconry, De arte venandi cum avibus, he corrected Aristotle wherever his own observation in the field disagreed. He respected the ancients, and he checked their work. He took remedies just as seriously. His laws separated the physician, who diagnosed, from the apothecary, who prepared. They set standards for how preparations were made, and they required physicians to be examined by the masters of Salerno before they could practise. A remedy, in his kingdom, was a craft with rules.

The women of Salerno

The medical school at Salerno, on the mainland of his kingdom, was already the most renowned in Europe. There, a body of writing now known as the Trotula addressed women’s health, including how to care for and adorn the skin. It is among the earliest medieval writing in Europe to treat women’s bodies as worth careful study.

Why we think about that court

The idea at its centre is the one we work from: the best remedies rarely come from one place. We let nature guide us.

Borage. The Romans steeped its blue flowers in wine, for courage and good spirits. Pliny the Elder wrote that it drove away sadness. Its seed oil is rich in gamma-linolenic acid, a fatty acid the skin uses to keep its barrier supple. In LAMELLARE™, we pair it with a 3.74% tripeptide complex: GHK-Cu, Palmitoyl Tripeptide-38 and Hexapeptide-11.

Kakadu plum. A traditional food and medicine of Aboriginal Australians, now recognized as one of the richest natural sources of vitamin C on earth. In ROWANE™, it sits alongside 8.88% vitamin C in three forms, with tocotrienols and carotenoids.

Kigelia africana. The fruit of the African sausage tree, used for generations by women across Africa for toning and firming. In FIRÈNE™, it anchors a 6.46% eight-peptide complex.

Ancestral Science™

Frederick refused to choose between the ancients and his own eyes, between faith in old texts and the proof of the field. We don’t choose either. Steinder Weisen began in a family of merchants who, since the early 1900s, travelled the world and came home with remedies the way other families bring back souvenirs. The house is part enterprise, part discovery: clinical science on one side, the world’s healing traditions on the other.

We call it Ancestral Science™. A remedy that has been used for generations is a kind of evidence: thousands of years of observation, passed from one hand to the next. Every formulation at the house begins with one of these remedies, an ancestral story that inspires us. Then comes the part Frederick would have recognized: the clinical science. Peptides chosen for the evidence behind them, lipids that mirror the skin’s own barrier, and concentrations of actives informed by peer-reviewed research.

Made for those who like to wonder.

From the house,
Steinder Weisen — Maison de Formulation