If only Lurpak smelt this nice! (The Body Shop Mango Body Butter)

Member Name: charby

Product:	The Body Shop Mango Body Butter
Date:	13/02/09 (160 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Smells nice, works well

Disadvantages: Not the most impressive body butter in the world

Before I discovered the fantastic shop that is Lush, I had a love affair with somewhere else: The Body Shop. The Body Shop company has been around for a long time, and has had a fantastic reputation for creating good quality bath and body products and a good price, and ethically. The Body Shop famously criticised large cosmetic companies such as L'oreal for testing their products on animals, until of course L'oreal itself bought The Body Shop not long ago. Hmmm.

I never really buy things from the Body Shop anymore, partly because of this hypocrisy, but also because of the fact that most of the sales assistants in the shops are far too pushy and don't seem to let customers browse in peace, as well as the fact that I prefer Lush. I used to love their skin and bath products, however, and was delighted when I found a pot of Mango Body Butter in a drawer at home. The sticker on the bottom of the pot said that you should use it within 12 months of opening, and I reckon that I've had it slightly longer, but on examining the Butter I found that it still looked fine and had the same consistency and smell as it did when it was new, so I decided to use it again.

The pot that I have is 200ml, though it is also available in smaller sizes. The pot is orange and circular, with an attractive sticker on the front. The sticker has the name of the product on it in both English and French in white text, with a background of cut mangos which look fresh and nice. The body butter itself is a pale yellow colour and has a soft yet smooth consistently, which is fairly solid but your fingers can go through it easily when you want to scoop some out.

Using this Body Butter is fairly simple - scoop some out of the pot with your fingers and rub it into your skin. Hopefully, this should make your skin feel smoother and softer, as well as making it smell nice. I've done a little experiment on myself for the purpose of this review to test how well it works and how soft it makes my skin feel. I've put some of this body butter onto my left arm and left leg, but not on my right limbs, to see how much of a difference the butter actually makes. The results are: on my arms, very little difference. I've felt both of my arms and found that the buttered arm and the control arm feel about as soft as each other. They do now have a different feel to them, and it is obvious that something has been used on my left arm, but it doesn't make it feel any softer. On my legs, however, it's a different story. My left buttered leg feels considerably softer than my right, and I am impressed with the results here. I don't know why this has happened, but I know now not to bother using this body butter on my arms as it doesn't make a difference, but I will experiment with using it on other parts of my body and see what happens there.

The last thing that I will talk about before I wrap up this review is the smell of this body butter. As you can tell from the name of the product, Mango Body Butter should smell like mangoes. Impressively, this butter smells very fruity both in the pot and on the skin, and I can definitely get a hint of mango from its scent. The fragrance is very summery and smells a lot like tropical fruits, and whenever I smell it I think of holidays in Spain and other hot countries.

In conclusion, I do like The Body Shop's Mango Body Butter, and will probably use the rest of the tub, or will at least continue using it until it's past its best. Although it didn't do an amazing job on my arms, I was impressed with the effect it had on my legs, and honestly I would probably still use it if it had no effect whatsoever for the beautiful smell alone. I wouldn't recommend this product if you have very dry skin on your body, but I would tell you to give it a go if you just want a bit of extra moisture and something to make your skin smell nice and summery.

Summary: A delicious smelling body butter