Our beauty editor's favourite shower oil hasn't changed in 20 years
If smell is a form of time travel, one particular L’Occitane shower oil hasn’t lost its power to transport me to a very specific time and place and give me an enormous amount of what we all used to call ‘the feels’. And for a beauty product I’ve used regularly for 20 years, with a smell that is now deeply familiar to me, that’s quite something.
I was the only beauty editor invited from London to the global launch of a new L’Occitane bodycare collection in February 2024. The UK PR (hi Rebecca!) and I took the Eurostar and TGV to Aix-en-Provence to visit 50 hectares of almond trees owned by a third-generation Provençal producer. We watched velvety green-jacketed almonds trundle along a conveyor belt in a rustic open-sided barn, learnt about a radical seed-to-shower approach that used every part of the nut and future-proofed local biodiversity, and were shown a collection of delicious oils, mists, lotions and creams, including an intriguing shower oil, designed to turn opaque and milky on contact with water and to moisturise as it cleanses, leaving skin as silky as the oil itself.
Almond Shower Oil
20 years is a long time, so I don’t remember much about the sustainable farming practices (it's all online if you’re keen to know more), but I still remember the first time I smelled that shower oil. Even now, it puts me instantly back in chilly, blue-skied Provence, or back in London that February, where I was dating a handsome mixologist from Islington called Rob (hi Rob!). It remains one of my favourite – if not the favourite – of all the smells in beauty.
Why is L’Occitane Almond Shower Oil so popular?
With multiple awards behind it, and selling one bottle a minute, L’Occitane Almond Shower Oil is one of those if-you-know-you-know beauty products... except most people know it. In the many celebrity beauty interviews I’ve carried out, it has multiple name checks. It’s not cheap but it's not extravagant – you could pick one up in your lunch break without completely wincing – and does in fact leave skin nourished, soft and bouncy, thanks to the omegas from sweet almond and grape seed oils, and zero harsh detergents. It’s a pregnancy must-have (no contra-indicated essential oils here) with myriad anecdotes swearing that it successfully staves off stretch marks, and it’s a no-brainer gift, as well as a gift-to-self that ticks the luxurious box as well as the useful one.
And I can make a case for useful. L’Occitane Almond Shower Oil doubles brilliantly as a shaving lubricant, which isn't an entirely cost-effective swap-in, but it's kinder on skin that the average shaving foam and it does save time (it's often the only body product I take on holiday for this reason). And as someone with dry-ish skin, I can happily skip the body lotion step if I’ve used this; it leaves skin feeling nicely supple and hydrated without being remotely greasy.
L’Occitane Almond Shower Oil is one of the original shower oils, if not the first. There are loads of those on the market now, but I think this has the most modern-feeling and non-dragging texture, and it's the best at emulsifying and rinsing off. Get the 500ml pump bottle and you’ll feel it lasts forever.
What does L’Occitane Almond Shower Oil smell like?
Really, that's what we’re all here for. You’ll hear it described as marzipan-y, which it is half-true but in a cleaner, softer form, with a tiny undercurrent of vanilla. It’s utterly joyful, and I think you’d really have to hate marzipan to find it remotely objectionable.
The franchise has since been joined by many other delicious things: Milky Bath and Hand & Nail Care are two others I use on repeat, though it's all pretty gorgeous. It's the shower oil that has my heart for twenty years, though, and in all the hundreds of other beauty products I try every year, I really don't see that changing.
Where to buy L’Occitane Almond Shower Oil
Almond Shower Oil
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