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In the head-spinning age of multistep skin-care routines and mic-drop makeup launches, The One is a space for minimalists to sound off on the single beauty product that’s found a longtime spot in their carefully curated routines.
Alighieri’s Rosh Mahtani, the first jewelry designer to be honored with the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, may be the wunderkind of London, but she actually spent the first nine years of her life in Zambia. “It really did have an impact on how I think about beauty today, mainly because objects like makeup and lipstick and skin care just weren’t as accessible,” she recalls. That, coupled with a minimalist above-the-neck ideology that her mother (who has long maintained a flawless facade with Pond’s drugstore cream and little else) instilled in her from a young age, meant “I always grew up with this mentality of less is more; it’s just about choosing the right things.”
Fast forward to today, the 32-year-old rarely strays from Blistex lip balm, Olay BB cream, and—“unfortunately for my bank account,” she adds with a laugh—Barbara Sturm’s Darker Skin Tones Face Cream. “I’m an obsessive person, so once I find something I like and I think works, I stick to it,” Mahtani says of her loyalist approach to cosmetics, which seldom sees the introduction of any new pigment or complexion hero. But she nevertheless made an exception just over a year ago when her close friend Nuria Val, whom she first met on a week-long work trip to Portugal’s Azores islands in 2017, sent her a sampling of the plant-based products from Val’s then-new line, Rowse. Though there was an array of floral waters, cold-pressed oils, and powder-to-clay masks spread before her, Mahtani was most drawn to a humble moss green bar soap.
“It became an immediate obsession,” recalls Mahtani, who quickly found that the balancing rosemary, thyme, and lemon essential oil formula, which she stores on a gold-plated seashell dish from Alighieri’s homeware collection, soothed her perennially dry skin—and allowed her to cut back on the number of items occupying precious real estate in her shower. “I used to use a body wash, and then an exfoliator, and then a really rich oily moisturizer,” she explains; now, she even uses the sustainably-sourced, vegan cleanser as shampoo in a pinch. “I love a product that’s made with such wholesome ingredients that you couldn’t ever use it for anything that would hurt you.”
Below, shop Rosh Mahtani’s The One.
