Today's Wisdom - Cigars, Aviation and Skincare

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. A brand-new interview series is on the way, featuring fascinating people answering three unique questions. Our first lesson coming soon spotlights a Spanish entrepreneur who's making waves on the East Coast with his thriving olive oil business! Today's wisdom explores:

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The cigar is far older than most people realize, and its very name carries its origin. Evidence of tobacco smoking by the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean dates back to the 9th century, and the word cigar descends from the Mayan word sikar, meaning to smoke rolled tobacco leaves. The Maya wrapped dried tobacco in palm or plantain leaves and smoked it in religious ceremonies, believing the smoke carried prayers to the spirit world. When Christopher Columbus reached Cuba in 1492, two of his sailors became the first Europeans to witness the practice. The Taíno had a word for them too: cohiba. One of those sailors, Rodrigo de Jerez, took up the habit so enthusiastically that when he returned home puffing smoke, his neighbors were convinced the devil had possessed him, and the Spanish Inquisition reportedly jailed him for it. He may be history’s first European punished for smoking.

Suspicion soon gave way to obsession. Spanish and Portuguese sailors carried the habit home, and it spread through the courts of Europe as a marker of wealth and sophistication. Spain built an entire industry around it, opening its first great cigar factory in Seville in 1758. Smoking rooms appeared in European hotels and clubs, special smoking carriages were added to trains, and a new garment, the smoking jacket, entered the wardrobe. To this day the French still call a tuxedo le smoking. Cigars became inseparable from a certain idea of power, clenched in the jaws of figures like Winston Churchill, Ulysses S. Grant, and Mark Twain, who claimed to smoke up to twenty-two a day.

The strangest twist came in the twentieth century. After Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, Cuba nationalized its cigar industry and in 1961 created the Cohiba brand. Then in 1962, President John F. Kennedy, about to sign the embargo that would cut off Cuban goods from America forever, secretly dispatched his press secretary to buy up every Cuban cigar he could find. The man returned with around 1,200 of Kennedy’s favorite Petit Upmanns, and only once they were safely in hand did the president sign the ban. Overnight the Cuban cigar became forbidden fruit in its largest market, and exiled cigar makers fled with their seeds and skills to the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras, seeding the rival industries that thrive today. A leaf the Maya once burned to speak with their gods had become a luxury so prized that a president broke his own embargo to stockpile it first.

History remembers the names of the pioneers who first conquered the air, the Wrights, Santos-Dumont, Blériot, but it tends to forget the man who paid for much of it to happen. Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe was born in Paris in 1846, heir to a family oil business his father had founded selling vegetable oils before pivoting, after petroleum was struck in Pennsylvania in 1859, into the new and enormously profitable world of refined oil. Henri turned the company into one of the largest in Europe. He grasped a crucial commercial truth earlier than almost anyone: that the future of oil depended entirely on the engines that would burn it. If he could spur the invention of light, powerful combustion engines, he would create the demand that made his product indispensable.

So he did something unusual with his money. Rather than simply funding inventors, he dangled prizes to ignite competition. In 1900 he offered the Deutsch Prize, a then-staggering 100,000 francs, to the first aviator who could fly from the Parc Saint-Cloud, round the Eiffel Tower, and return in under thirty minutes. The challenge captivated Paris and drew in the dashing Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont. On 19 October 1901, Santos-Dumont nearly lost his airship against the roof of a hotel, suffered an engine failure mid-flight, and had to climb out over the gondola rail without a harness to restart it in the air. He crossed the line in 29 minutes and 30 seconds. In a gesture that thrilled the city, the aviator gave half the money to his crew and donated the other half to the poor of Paris.

Deutsch never stopped. He co-founded the Aéro-Club de France, created further prizes including one won by Henry Farman in 1908, partnered briefly with the Wright brothers to bring their aircraft to France, and funded research institutes in aeronautics. His passion ran so deep that he poured it into art as well as engineering, composing an opera called Icare, the first known stage work inspired by flight. He had added de la Meurthe to the family name as a patriotic gesture after France lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, and his philanthropy outlived him through his brother’s funding of student housing in Paris. He represents a particular and underrated kind of genius. He could not fly a plane and invented nothing himself, but he understood that the surest way to summon a future into being is to make it worth someone’s while to build it.

The skincare industry sells a beautiful lie: that healthy skin requires a ten-step routine and a shelf of expensive serums. Dermatologists, almost unanimously, say the opposite. The single most powerful thing you can do for your skin is also the dullest: wear sunscreen every day. Ultraviolet radiation is the leading cause of both premature ageing and skin cancer, and it is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the wrinkles, sunspots, and sagging people spend fortunes trying to reverse. UVA rays pass straight through clouds and even windows, so the damage accumulates on grey winter mornings and at your desk, not just on the beach. Dermatologists call a daily broad-spectrum SPF 30 or higher the closest thing we have to a fountain of youth. Apply it every morning, and reapply every two hours when you are outdoors.

Beyond protection, the proven essentials are surprisingly few, and less is more is the rule professionals live by. Cleanse twice a day with a gentle, non-stripping wash, since harsh scrubbing damages the skin barrier that keeps moisture in and irritation out. Follow with a moisturiser suited to your skin, lightweight gel for oily types, a richer cream with ceramides for dry ones. The one ingredient with decades of hard evidence behind it is the retinoid, a derivative of vitamin A that the New England Journal of Medicine regards as the most proven treatment for both acne and ageing. It works by accelerating the turnover of skin cells and boosting collagen, genuinely smoothing fine lines rather than merely promising to. The catch is that it demands patience, start with a pea-sized amount a couple of nights a week, expect some flaking at first, and build up slowly over two to three months.

The real secret is that skincare rewards consistency far more than novelty. A simple routine followed every day for years will always beat an elaborate one abandoned after a fortnight, and piling on multiple active ingredients at once tends to inflame the skin rather than improve it. Introduce anything new one product at a time, so you can tell what is helping and what is causing a reaction. It helps to remember that the skin is your largest organ and reflects the basics of how you live, so sleep, water, and a decent diet show up on your face as surely as any cream. Most of what determines how your skin ages comes down to two unglamorous habits repeated for decades: protecting it from the sun, and resisting the urge to overcomplicate everything else.

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The A Little Wiser Team