MAKANAI

Skin care with a material difference – one it owes to a surprising discovery at the ancient Yoshitaka gold leaf foundry in Kanazawa, Japan. There, some 100 years ago, highly skilled craftswomen would hammer 24K gold into micro-thin, impossibly delicate sheets of gold leaf, layering them with washi paper that they also created by hand using natural materials. The extreme heat and drying conditions in the foundry were far from ideal for the skin. Yet even the oldest of the artisans had beautifully soft, youthful looking hands...

OUR STORY

Gold leaf workers at the foundry had hands that looked decades younger than their ages as a lifetime result of immersion in the fermented paste used to make the washi paper for gold leaf manufacture.