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When they're not just sitting in the wooden bowl on your kitchen counter waiting to be eaten, many fruits play key roles in the outside world. In the case of a lemon, you can make lemonade. Apples, consumed regularly, are said to keep the doctor away. And peaches — well, let's just say that peaches are probably getting a few callbacks following their starring turn in Call Me By Your Name.
But what of one of the produce aisle's more underrated fruits, the plum? A ripe plum is sweet and tart, dark, firm, and fresh — delicious in wines and jams, salted or pickled as saladito or umeboshi, packed with vitamins (C, mostly) and phytochemical compounds that do a body good.
As it happens, the same properties that make plums rich in antioxidants and nutrients translate pretty well to skin care, too. The Kakadu plum, straight outta Australia, is one of the world's richest sources of vitamin C; cultivated in arid, mountainous regions, it's been forced to develop a strong constitution to survive, and it'll give the same resilience to your skin. On the other side of the world in California, three sisters have cofounded an organic beauty line driven by the "power of the plum," inspired by the dried fruits on their 100-year-old family farm — the world's largest grower and producer of organic plums.
Horticultural research shows that plums may have been one of the very first fruits domesticated by humans all over the world; their remains have been found in archaeological sites dating back to the Neolithic age. Fast forward to 2018, and you've got an antioxidant-packed, vitamin C-powered fruit that's worth eating — and working into your skin-care routine, so you can reap all the benefits without ever having to set foot in your neighborhood CSA.
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