In the wetlands of the Brazilian Amazon, and the savanna just south of it, grows a palm that people have leaned on for as long as anyone can remember. Mauritia flexuosa, the buriti palm, stands over a hundred feet tall and grows where the ground stays wet all year. Families eat its fruit, drink its juice, weave its fibers, and roof their houses with its fronds. The naturalists who traveled the region called it the tree of life.

The fruit looks like a small pinecone dipped in red wax: scaly, reddish-brown, a little smaller than your fist. Peel the scales back and the pulp underneath is a deep, wet orange. Press that pulp and you get one of the most vividly colored oils in the plant world.

You’ve probably heard that if you eat too many carrots, you’ll turn orange. That’s carotenoids at work. Flamingos are pink for the same reason: it’s what they eat. Buriti carries more beta-carotene than almost any plant oil on earth, more than carrot oil itself, so yes, it is very, very orange. But there’s more to buriti than its looks. The orange is a clue to what’s inside: vitamin A in the making, vitamin E, and the fatty acids your skin is built from.

What changes after 50

So what does a rainforest palm have to do with your face now?

After estrogen drops, your skin picks up habits it never had before. It gets dry in a way that lotion doesn’t fix, and it turns red and reactive over nothing much. Places that used to feel smooth feel rough. Because it renews itself more slowly, the surface hangs on to dull, tired cells longer than it should, and the decades of sun that never seemed to matter start showing up as uneven tone and a flat, sallow cast. Women describe it to us the same way almost every time: “I look tired even when I’m not.”

Tired isn’t the problem. Your skin is under-fed and under-defended. Thankfully, Nature has no shortage of nutrient-dense oils we can put on our skin that help support it in life after 50. The key is in the formulation and how concentrated it is. (You don’t want it watered down.)

What makes buriti different

Three things make this a formulator’s ingredient, not a marketing ingredient.

It’s ultra-moisturizing, and it moisturizes the right way. Buriti is rich in oleic and linoleic acids, the same fatty acids that hold your skin’s barrier together. Instead of sitting on top of dry skin, it slots into the barrier, so moisture stays in and irritants stay out. That’s why the softness lasts past the first hour.

It’s a light shield your skin can absorb. Carotenoids are how plants protect themselves from the sun. Researchers have tested creams made with buriti oil on human skin cells under UV light and found they reduced the damage the cells took. It is not a sunscreen, and we’ll say that again below. But it’s a meaningful layer of defense to wear underneath one.

It feeds renewal and calms the surface. Beta-carotene is what your body turns into vitamin A, the nutrient behind healthy skin turnover, and buriti pairs it with vitamin E. Lab studies on wound healing keep showing faster, cleaner skin recovery with buriti in the mix, and its fatty acids quiet the low-grade inflammation that makes skin after menopause look blotchy and feel reactive.

Put those three together and you get what most women mean when they say “vibrant”: skin that is moisturized, protected, and calm enough to look like itself again.

Why Transform is orange

Buriti is one of the reasons Transform is orange. Buah merah, its antioxidant partner in the formula, is the other. The carotenoids in both oils are the pigment, so the deeper the orange, the more of the good stuff is in the bottle. You can’t fake that with a dye, and you can’t hide it either. When we chose these oils for Transform, we chose the color that comes with them.

That’s why Transform is a deep orange gel. Nothing was added to make it that color. It’s the color of what it’s made of, and we’d rather you see that than a pale serum with a beautiful ingredient on the label and not much of it inside.

Buriti is the deep orange one. The color is the carotenoids, showing themselves.