$13,000-a-Jar Moisturizer Will Help Your Skin Cells 'Radiate Light'

If you’re fabulously wealthy, capricious, and so vain that the only substance able to keep your face molecules from melting is a fine amalgam of silk and pearls that took four pearl divers each to retrieve, then by gosh do I have good news for you! A new face cream — though “face cream” is probably too vulgar a phrase, since what we’re really talking about is a nearly invisible compound that can be applied as a forcefield to keep the poors from ever mingling their French fry and cola breath with your skin cells — is “available” at a cost per gram of $260, more than four times the value of 24-carat gold, which currently hovers somewhere around $56 per gram.

Has your interest been aroused from its internet slumber? In order to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its super-expensive, strictly-for-people-who-don’t poop Clé de Peau Beauté line, Japanese cosmetics brand Shiseido has unveiled a limited-edition moisturizer called simply La Crème, a bottle of which goes for 1.05 million Japanese yen, or a little more than $13,000. La Crème is made of crushed pearls, silk and the tears of the very last Bengal tiger, the better to “support the skin’s nanostructure and help skin cells radiate light.” Shiseido commissioned French crystal maker Saint-Louis (which boasts that it was making glass and fabricating crystal before the Turks were clear of Vienna) to make three and only three handcrafted jars to hold 50 milliliters each of La Crème. The jars have platinum bands (three platinum bands) and a gold-colored spatula, you know, for irony.

Shiseido will start taking orders for La Crème on Sept. 20, and has announced that if more than three orders are placed, a good old fashioned lottery will be held and the winner will be stoned to death with all three jars of Le Crème. For all you normies, a more affordable 84,000 yen version has been concocted and will be sold with Happy Meals at a McDonald’s near you.