Bigger And Brighter

Forest Essentials has grown from a single store in Delhi when the Ayurvedic beauty company launched 19 years ago to around 70 stores across the country today. Now it has its eyes firmly fixed on the international market.

- Arnika Thakur

OVER THE AGES, people have been obsessed with the quest for beauty and eternal youth. It is said Cleopatra bathed in the milk of asses. And Mary Queen of Scots washed her face with white wine. And in India, Ayurvedic beauty company Forest Essentials buries dates and litchis under a banyan tree to ferment to make its Eternal Youth anti-ageing cream. Ancient Ayurvedic wisdom says that under the shade of the banyan tree, the fruit ferments at a certain pace. If there is too much sun, it will ferment too quickly; if it doesn’t have enough, it ferments slowly. And while workers at the Forest Essentials factory are mixing the ingredients for the cream—described as an ancient formulation from the early 17th century—they chant special mantras. “It’s for positive vibrations. I have been asked over the years, ‘Do they really do this chant?’ They really do. It imbibes the energy into the product,” Mira Kulkarni, chairman and managing director of Mountain Valley Springs, the parent company of Forest Essentials, tells me in an interview at her home in Panchsheel Park, an upscale New Delhi neighbourhood.