Korres

Korres began not with a cream but with a cough remedy. The brand's very first product was an aromatic herbal syrup of honey and aniseed, a recipe George Korres adapted from rakomelo — the warming honey-and-spirit drink his grandfather favored back on the island of Naxos. That bridge between family memory and pharmacy bench captures how the line actually started: as a working apothecary's experiments, not a beauty launch.

Korres came to Athens to study pharmacology and took a post in 1989 at the Tzivanides Pharmacy, set up in the mid-1960s as Greece's first homeopathic dispensary, tucked behind the Kallimarmaro stadium. He was skeptical of homeopathy at first, then won over by the herbal archive he was handed — by some accounts around 3,000 preparations — when he was trusted to manage the shop in 1992. The leap from compounding remedies to selling skincare came with the Wild Rose 24-Hour Moisturising Cream, the brand's first proper skincare product and the one that turned a local Greek venture into a global best-seller, seeding the rosehip-and-vitamin-C identity the range still leans on.

Growth followed quickly. The company listed on the Athens stock exchange, distributed in the United States at one point through a Johnson & Johnson arrangement, and rolled out standalone stores across Europe and into Asian markets including Singapore and South Korea. By its twentieth anniversary in 2016 it was expanding through acquisition rather than just shelf space.

The through-line is a pharmacist's habit of sourcing close to home — Greek yoghurt, black pine, wild rose, and native herbs treated as functional actives rather than scenery. The honest caveat is unchanged: the efficacy case rests on that ingredient research and the pharmacy lineage more than on a deep file of independent clinical trials.

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