Venture into the fridge of your average beauty editor and the chances are that alongside the cartons of almond milk and coconut water you’ll find a stash of face creams and lotions. The thinking being that, since sunlight and heat are the enemies of an active ingredient, keeping products cool means they’ll last longer.
Call it the cult of luxury but sharing space with comestibles is no longer enough for cosmetics: fridges, long the preserve of the kitchen, are popping up in the bathroom. Designed in bijoux sizes of four-to-nine litres, and with temperatures ranging from 8C-12C (warmer than the recommended 4C temperature for food), the cosmetics fridge is the beauty world’s equivalent of the jewellery box, helping to store your most precious products. Miniature make-up coolers in Hello Kitty styles are already a big hit in South Korea, where the concept was developed, and you can get your own cowhide, cloud or polka-dot version shipped here through Ebay. But while they may be easily justifiable in sweltering cities such as Seoul (melted make-up is no laughing matter, after all), their arrival in more temperate London signifies a new chapter in luxury fixtures and fittings.
At the West End’s Rathbone Square (the former central London Royal Mail site being transformed into shops, offices and 142 luxury residences) each of the penthouse suites, on the market for upwards of about £4.5m, has its own cosmetics fridge. They measure 40cm by 50cm and are hidden beneath a veneer storage unit (pictured above). “It was part of the brief that the master bathrooms include a cooler for beauty products,” says Kalliopi Kousouri, a partner at Make Architects. “The presumption is that people in these properties will have expensive cosmetics and keeping them in the fridge is good for longer shelf lives.” Development super-duo the Candy Brothers also report receiving increased requests for make-up fridges, often from wealthy Arab clients.