After visiting Weleda gardens earlier this summer, I was incredibly impressed with their ethos and the care with which they approach both ingredient sourcing and product development. They have been very busy this year bringing lots of new goodies over the course of past few months, with the almond body collection launching tomorrow.
Both the products I'm reviewing are probably not something I would have picked up of the shelf under different circumstances. First of all I'm a diehard fan of artisan soap, and after my showers I tend to reach for a body oil. That isn't to say that I don't use shower gels or body lotions, I do, I like choice and occasionally these are the products that are most appropriate to my mood or circumstance. To be clear, I'm not setting the scene to tell you guys how all of a sudden I'm a convert because of these particular products, and now I can't imagine how I ever lived without shower gel and body cream, and so on and so forth. I want to put this review in perspective, so it will be useful to people who enjoy these types of products, and to anyone who is trying to figure out if it is for them.
I was very tempted to talk about the body lotion first (mm I clearly don't have a favourite between the two, there is no bias, none at all), but it makes sense to talk about the shower gel before the lotion, since that is what I would use first in the shower and all that. Plus it has been released earlier, about a month ago. So without any further glimpses at my writing process, what is the big deal about this shower gel? Well if you are a Weleda aficionado, you already know that their previous shower companions are actually creamy washes, so this is their first shower gel. I haven't tried any of their shower creams, so I can't make a comparison between the two, but my understanding is that arnica sports gel* was designed to give a good lather where the creams do not. While we don't really need lots of suds to get clean, it is what most of us are accustomed to, and it does make it a lot easier to spread the product. Many years of reading ladies magazines have drilled into me that "squeaky clean is for dishes, not for skin", but on the occasion when you feel extra grubby after excercise or extremely hot weather, I find myself craving that squeakiness. This is the bottle to pull out on those occasions, because the fact that you can make bubbles with this shower gels tricks me into thinking that I could make a frying pan shine with it, yet the surfactants used in it are way milder than the ones in a bottle of Fairy. More so, arnica shower gel has been formulated in a way to help protect skins natural moisture while cleansing. Now this of course doesn't mean that your skin will not experience any dryness, or that you won't experience any sensitivities, just that as far as shower gels go, it is well formulated and skin friendly, as long as you don't have personal sensitivities to the ingredients in it. Personally I quiet like it, I don't have dry skin to begin with but of course some shower gels, and even my beloved soaps, have had that effect on it (even causing some itchy dry patches, not at all fun). After washing with arnica sports shower gel my skin has been very happy, its normal self, just fresh like it should be after a shower.
Does the fact that it has Arnica do anything? Well since it is a rinse off product, and it is not on the body long enough, Weleda can not and do not make any claims that it eases weary muscles and such things as they do with the arnica body oils. When I excercise, I don't actually push myself to the point where I would feel the burn and all that, so while I do work up a sweat on occasion, I really can't say if there is any extra relief that my muscles would feel as opposed to using any other shower gel. I do however feel more perked up when I use it in comparison to my regular showers. Is it a placebo effect, or the effect of rosemary and lavender that are in here for their aromatherapeutic effect, is it arnica, or all of the above? It doesn't really matter, I feel refreshed and ready to face the day (or whatever is left of it).
The scent is quite sharp, I would describe it as unisex, to my nose rosemary is dominant. If you like to share your shower products with the other half it's definitely a good one to choose, although Mr.RF has been known to "borrow" my raspberry bubble bath, so I guess it all depends on your other halfs preferences. It works, the ingredients have been grown and harvested with care for the environment, and 200ml bottle is under ten pounds, it's in my good books.
Almond Body Lotion*.
I don't moisturise my body every single day, I tend to do it on the days that I wash my hair, because that means I spent a lot longer in the shower, and those are the days that I would normally use a body scrub too. I love my body oils, but there are some body lotions and body butters in my stash as well, just not as many, and no, they are not as favoured. So for me to like a lotion it has to have all of the following: smell good, sink in well with no greasy film, actually make some sort of difference compared to if no product was used, and smell good once more. Why am I being so fussy? Simply because body oils make a huge difference to how my skin feels and looks, so for me to use some other type of moisturising body product, it has to offer something as good or different. Normally what the body oils don't quiet offer is the full range of scents that I enjoy, and they lack that cooling effect that I get from a lotion that is especially nice when it's warm outside.
Time to confess, I love almonds and marzipan. Products that smell like the real deal are almost guaranteed to be a winner. While judging products on scent is not all and be all, there are a lot to choose from out there, and bar tackling a specific skin condition or irritation, the scent does have a lot to do with whether or not it will get a gold star from me. This lotion smells heavenly, it always manages to make me think of Nut cracker (my love of marzipan spreads to ballet as well).
On the bottle it states that this lotion is PH skin balanced, a very good thing since even hard water can bring skins ph out of balance, combined with some over vigorous scrubbing during the shower, it's definitely good to follow that up with something that would help bring things into balance. Almond body lotion sinks in like a dream, leaving only super soft skin behind.
The bottle itself is an airless pump, so there is no finger dipping involved. Also while I was looking at the nozzle, I noticed that there is this sort of clear plastic type of thing that looks like it's blocking it or something. At closer inspection the lotion comes out around the sides of this tiny circular contraption, so there is never any cream oxidising and blocking the nozzle, very clever.
The almond range will become available tomorrow and I will update my links as soon as.
PR samples, opinions expressed in this post, as in all my posts, are my own, honest, influenced purely by my personal taste and based on experience with the products that are being reviewed.
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