To walk into a Fresh skin-care store is to step into the land of milk and honey. Literally. To take but a single whiff of their Nectarine Milk soap is to bid a fond farewell to $13 plus tax. They make a sake bath wash so delectable you want to drink it. (Don’t, even if it is 50 percent sake.) Fresh is a multimillion-dollar company now and can be found in your higher-end shopping malls. But in the early 1990s, it was a humble apothecary business, one of the first to bring food-grade ingredients to the luxury beauty market. Fresh had the first body scrub, Brown Sugar Body Polish, with real brown sugar crystals in it. Its simple milk and chocolate lotions were revolutionary in a cosmetics industry successfully hawking products so high-tech it could teach Silicon Valley a thing or two. These days, Fresh’s packaging is still appealingly clean, and the lotions and potions still smell yummy enough to eat. The formula clearly works. The best way to a woman’s pocketbook, apparently, is through her stomach. 189 The Grove Drive, (323) 932-2580; 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., Century City, (310) 552-0798; 1407 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica, (310) 451-0302; fresh.com. —Gendy Alimurung

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