Floral concretes from two tuberose cultivars for potent uses in herbal skin-care products

Abstract

Flowers of tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa L.) are usually fragrant and are cultivated commercially to meet the demand of both loose and cut flower applications. This in turn generates huge floral wastes after their utilization in decoration and rituals. In this work we aim to explore waste flowers to isolate floral concrete as by-product for possible utility in skincare products. Such attempt of converting floral waste into commodity product remained apparently unexplored with cultivated flowers including tuberose. Further, no information is apparently available on the phytoconstituent of the tuberose floral concrete that constitute its waxy nature. Here we extracted floral concrete from waste flowers of two popular tuberose cultivars namely, Calcutta Single (CS) and Calcutta Double (CD) using n-hexane as solvent. Floral concrete extracts after derivatization were subjected to GC-MS analysis which revealed the presence of several fatty acid and fatty acid ester compounds. Presence of higher content of fatty acids in floral concrete of CD was detected. In contrast, ester components were found to be higher in CS, suggestive of its fragrant nature. Extracted floral concretes from both the cultivars exhibited comparable antioxidant capacities and DNA protection abilities. Further, floral concrete from CS cultivar showed higher inhibition of tyrosinase activity than CD, while elastase and hyaluronidase activities were greatly inhibited by the extracted concrete from CD cultivar suggesting their possible utility in skin-care product.