Asche Basis

Asche Basis is a German pharmacy skincare line made up of four basic-care products: a cream, an ointment, a rich anhydrous ointment and a body lotion. It was developed by the Hamburg pharmaceutical company Asche AG and has belonged to the Italian pharmaceutical group Chiesi since 2002, when the rights to the series passed to Chiesi as part of a larger business sale [9]. Today it is presented by Chiesi's German subsidiary, Chiesi GmbH in Hamburg, and is sold exclusively in pharmacies.

The line has two lives. For consumers it is an everyday moisturising range for dry and sensitive skin. For pharmacists it is also a set of standard bases: the owner says the products are still used as the foundation for compounded preparations, in which a pharmacy mixes a prescribed active ingredient into a ready-made cream or ointment [6]. Much of the brand's current activity serves that second role.

The series began as an in-house development of Asche AG, a Hamburg company that at the turn of the millennium was a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical group Schering. The current owner's consumer guide describes it simply as having been "originally developed" by Asche AG, and an online pharmacy likewise calls it a dermatological development of the Hamburg firm [10]. No individual founder or developer is named in any account; the line is credited to the company as a whole.

Within Asche AG, the series belonged to the company's general-practice business, the range of products aimed at family doctors. It sat in that portfolio alongside medicines such as Otobacid N and Schnupfen Endrine.

The decisive moment in the line's history came in 2002. On 3 June that year, a trade report announced that Schering's subsidiary Asche AG had agreed to sell its general-practice business to the Italian company Chiesi Farmaceutici [9]. The deal went further than a list of product licences. According to the same report, the traditional Hamburg name ASCHE itself passed to the new company, together with all rights to the general-practice products, and Asche Basis was named explicitly among them. The new Hamburg company was called Asche Chiesi.

The report also described how the handover was to work in practice. Production of the transferred products would, for the time being, partly continue as contract manufacturing by Asche in Hamburg, while Asche's production operations were to be separated from Schering in a distinct step. In other words, the brand and the manufacturing did not move in one piece.

According to Chiesi's own company history, it took over Asche AG's general-practice business in 2002 and traded as Asche Chiesi GmbH in Hamburg; in 2009 the company was renamed Chiesi GmbH. With that rename the Asche name disappeared from the company title and survived chiefly in the product line.

The accounts differ on what exactly changed hands. Chiesi's history page and the 2002 trade report both describe the purchase of the general-practice business only [2][9]. The current Asche Basis consumer guide, updated in 2025, puts it more broadly, saying that when Chiesi established itself in Germany in 2002 it took over Asche AG and, with it, the Asche Basis care series [6]. Because the 2002 report states that Asche's production was to be spun off from Schering separately, the narrower description is the more precise one; the guide's wording reads as a simplification.

In the years since, the line has been kept up rather than reinvented: its recent milestones are technical documents for pharmacists rather than product launches (see Current status).

Asche Basis is owned by Chiesi and managed in Germany by Chiesi GmbH, headquartered in Hamburg. An online pharmacy's brand page likewise records that the Hamburg product series has been part of the Chiesi brand portfolio since 2002.

The parent group is a pharmaceutical company rather than a cosmetics house. Chiesi was founded in 1935 in Parma, Italy, by the chemist Giacomo Chiesi; his sons Alberto and Paolo took over its management in 1966, and a third generation of the family later joined the business. Its German subsidiary says it has grown from 74 to around 400 employees and today sells prescription medicines and medical devices in respiratory care, neonatology, rare diseases and transplantation medicine. Against that background, Asche Basis is an unusual holding: on Chiesi's German website it is the only line listed under the cosmetics category.

The consumer guide states that Chiesi is a certified B Corp, a certification for companies that meet set standards of social and environmental performance [6]. This is a statement about the owner company as a whole, not a certification of the Asche Basis products themselves.

Before 2002 the series belonged to Asche AG, then part of Schering.

Chiesi presents Asche Basis as a care series developed for different skin needs and says it is especially suitable for sensitive skin because it is well tolerated. The company adds that the products care for and protect the skin against everyday environmental influences and so support its natural protective function. The consumer guide carries the headline "So individuell wie wir" ("As individual as we are"), a phrase that matches the idea of a small range covering different skin conditions rather than a single hero product.

The positioning is deliberately plain. The line makes no claims about named active ingredients, anti-ageing effects or proprietary technology. It is sold as a basic, pharmacy-only range for dry and sensitive skin, and the owner classifies it as cosmetics rather than as a medicine. Its distinctive trait is the dual use as both finished skincare and compounding base, which ties it closely to the pharmacy counter.

The range has four members, each assigned to a different degree of dryness:

- Asche Basis Creme is listed for dry and sensitive skin and comes in 50 ml, 100 ml and 1,000 ml sizes. It is water-based, with a water content of 68 %. - Asche Basis Lotio is intended as body care after bathing or showering and is sold in a 200 ml size. It has the highest water content of the range, at 75 %. - Asche Basis Salbe is listed for dry to very dry skin. It is a water-in-oil emulsion with about 33 % water, making it richer than the cream. - Asche Basis Fettsalbe is listed for irritated, chronically dry skin. It contains no water at all.

What links the four is their base. Petrolatum (petroleum jelly) and liquid paraffin, a mineral oil, appear in the ingredient lists of every product. The Fettsalbe is the simplest formula: Chiesi lists it as petrolatum, liquid paraffin, paraffin, microcrystalline wax and hydrogenated castor oil [3]. A pharmacy reference entry for the cream gives a longer list that includes purified water, stearyl alcohol, an emulsifier, benzyl alcohol, liquid paraffin, yellow petrolatum, a thickener and perfume, followed by several fragrance components [12].

That last point is where sources disagree. An online pharmacy describes the line as fragrance-neutral cosmetics [11]. Chiesi's own published ingredient lists, however, include perfume together with fragrance allergens such as limonene, linalool, geraniol and cinnamyl alcohol in the cream, the ointment and the lotion [3]. Only the Fettsalbe is listed without perfume. On the manufacturer's own data, therefore, three of the four products contain added fragrance.

The more specialised side of the range concerns pharmacy compounding. Because pharmacists mix prescribed drugs into the creams and ointments, they need to know which active ingredients each base will tolerate and how long the resulting mixture keeps. Chiesi publishes a compatibility table for this purpose; its 11th edition is dated October 2025 and states that the Asche Basis bases are manufactured according to current good manufacturing practice (GMP) guidelines [7]. Detailed compatibility and shelf-life data are kept in a password-protected area for healthcare professionals. The company also provides certificates of analysis for individual production batches and a specification that pharmacies can use to confirm the identity of a product before compounding with it [8].

No proprietary technologies, patents or clinical studies are documented for the line. No current production site is named either; the contract manufacturing in Hamburg described in 2002 was presented as a transitional arrangement.

No awards are documented for Asche Basis. Its main appearance in independent coverage is the 2002 trade report on the sale of Asche AG's general-practice business, which named the series among the rights transferred to Chiesi. It is also listed in an online pharmacy encyclopedia among bases used for compounding.

Asche Basis is an acquired brand that remains in active production. It passed from Asche AG to Chiesi in 2002 and continues as a Chiesi pharmacy skincare line in Germany, where its products carry German pharmacy product numbers (PZN) and are sold only through pharmacies.

The line shows steady recent maintenance rather than expansion. The consumer guide was updated in 2025, the compatibility table reached its 11th edition in October 2025, and the formulation page links an identity-test specification dated September 2026 together with certificate-of-analysis overviews that extend to 2026 production batches.