Holland's Tulip Fields Are Hiding The Next Big Beauty Secret

I’m standing up to my knees in tulips on a private farm just outside of Amsterdam when the sun bursts through the clouds overhead. Sunshine drenches the fields of lush bulbous blooms, lighting them up from the highway to the horizon in electric stripes of white, yellow, and red. It’s even better than the pictures.

“We were on a mission to find out what’s in a tulip, and whether we can make something beautiful and good for the skin.”

As I tip-toe through the delicate rows, I ask the owner of the private farm what will happen to all these beautiful flowers at the end of the season. “They're getting chopped off and composted tomorrow,” he says flatly. “It’s only the bulbs that we sell all over the world.”

That’s right, all 1.7 billion of the multicolored tulips that flood your Instagram feed from March through April end up crushed and forgotten in the iron jaws of a harvesting machine. For tulip farmers, the real draw is the bulb, and to get it while it’s hot (or, rather, before it gets too hot), they have to cut off the stems at a stage in which they’re too short to sell in bouquets. That’s where Kim Jensen, co-founder of Bloomeffects, saw an opportunity.

“Tulips are globally one of the top favorite flowers, but it’s one of the only flowers that hasn’t been diversified into a different category or even industry,” she says, referring to the popularity of rose, CBD, jasmine, and other natural ingredients in the skin-care world. “We were on a mission to find out what’s in a tulip, and whether we can make something beautiful and good for the skin.”