Moonlight flower

Moonlight flower, also known as queen of the night, is a cactus native to the warm, humid, tropical forests of Central America, and has spectacular blossoms that can reach up to 40 centimeters in diameter. Sometimes it can take up to 20 years to witness the plant’s first flowers, which bloom only one night a year and release a powerful vanilla-like scent that attracts pollinating insects for the few hours they remain open. The plant’s Latin name, Selenicereus grandiflorus, comes from the Greek goddess of the moon, Selena, as a reference to the flower’s exclusive nighttime blooming activity. In France, it was Queen Marie-Antoinette's favorite flower, and she would spend long hours watching the plant. Clarins’ moonlight flower blossoms are harvested by hand and extracted while fresh by a cryoextraction process at -196°C. The very low temperature of this extraction method makes it possible to preserve the flowers’ most potent and fragile active anti-aging ingredients for use in our formulas.