FORGET EVERYTHING YOU'VE heard about chocolate. Instead of adding inches to your hips, it takes them away. Instead of making your skin break out, it brightens your complexion. That's the gospel according to Ishi Choco Therapy - one of the more popular attractions at the recent Professional Beauty Fair in London.
The Dafla Skin Care Institute - an Italian family company - created the Ishi Elements label, described as a 'luxury gourmet skin-food line'. It's easy to see why. The Choco Therapy product list reads like a dessert menu: chocolate orange mousse face mask, tiramisu face serum and white chocolate cellulite cream. You can even have chocolate oil rubbed all over your body. It all sounds delicious, but what are the benefits?
Ishi therapists say chocolate is full of the vitamins and minerals your skin needs - iron, magnesium, potassium, calcium, and vitamins C, D and E. It contains free radicals and antioxidants to slow the ageing process and caffeine to fight fat. Choco Therapy treats the body from the inside out. Before products are slathered on, clients are asked to eat a square of custom-designed chocolate called Tartufo. 'It provides an internal boost of polyphenals, which are good for anti-ageing, plus minerals and vitamins,' says Ishi therapist Lyanne Millhouse.
The company's founder spent eight years researching and sourcing his products. 'If you want to cook a special recipe, you need to start with the highest quality ingredients,' says Ishi's scientific director and president Davide Antichi, from the sidelines of the three-day exhibition in the ExCel London centre. 'Otherwise, you could be the best chef in the world, but you couldn't do anything special.' His passion for food pervades every business aspect - from the chocolate treatments to products based on Italian truffles and wine.
Dafla claims to be the first company in the world to harness the hydrating and supposedly anti-ageing properties of truffles (luxury mushrooms). The centrepiece is called caviar (although there's no caviar involved). A paste of black truffles, coriander and star anise is ground in a pestle and mortar. It's then smeared over the face and neck. Black truffles contain amino acids that are said to have an anti-wrinkle property. 'Truffles work by mimicking cell production in the skin,' says Millhouse.
Antichi says truffle treatments can also reduce spots caused by age, hormones or sun damage by 60 per cent in a month. This is achieved through a special lightening cream with a rare white truffle known as 'the white diamond'. He says it blocks the production of melanin, the pigment that gives skin its colour.
Vino Therapy is Ishi's grape-based treatment line and its product list is a wine aficionado's dream come true. It features a Cabernet Sauvignon lotion and Pinot Noir body-toning cream. Like chocolate, grapes contain antioxidants and a host of beneficial vitamins and minerals.
