L'Occitane

I first tried L'Occitane's peony hand cream through a free offer and loved it so I decided to try some other products. As you will see, I had mixed results.

Shea Butter Hand Cream-$10 for 1 oz or $28 for 5.2 oz

This hand cream is a little pricey but it is wonderful. It is creamy without being greasy and soaks in quickly and makes your hands lovely, silky, and smooth. The scents I have is are pivoine flora (peony flower which  is a light, sweet, flowery smell) and fleur de mangue (mango flower, which I at first thought smelled exactly like a fresh, ripe, mango but on closer smelling its actually a little synthetic smelling and could get a little obnoxious). It comes on a little strong when you first apply it but it fades to a more subtle scent. The hand cream comes in many different scents as well as an unscented version (which actually does have a light scent). I highly recommend it.

Ravissant Shower Gel- $8 for 2.5 oz or $20 for 8.4 oz
L’Occitane, I love your hand lotion but your shower gel, not so much.  First, the smell is bordering on atrocious. It smells like laundry detergent. And not even good laundry detergent. Cheap laundry detergent. It was all I could do to keep using the stuff until it was gone. It also left a weird filminess on my skin and was not that moisturizing. Of course I was using it in fall when it was starting to get cold and therefore drying to my skin. Maybe I would have had better results if I had used it in the middle of summer.

Fleur Cherie Bath and Shower Gel- $8 for 2.5 oz or $20 for 8.4 oz
I liked this shower gel better than the ravissant but still. Seriously L’Occitane? It was a subtler less obnoxious laundry detergent smell but still not something I would willingly use every day. It also was slightly more moisturizing and didn’t leave the weird film.

Aromachologie Repairing Shampoo & Conditioner- $8 for 2.5 oz, $20 for 8.4oz, $30 for 16.9oz or $25 for a 16.9 oz eco-refill

I didn’t like this shampoo or conditioner either. I definitely would not buy it. It has a very cloying, herby, noxious smell. That sticks to your hair forever. It smells to me like really strong rosemary (which is in the ingredients so that’s probably exactly what it is) which I like in my food but not in my hair. The conditioner is a little subtler and sweeter and if you use enough conditioner it tones down the shampoo. But I still did not enjoy getting a whiff of it every time I turned my head and feeling a little nauseous. But enough about the smell. It is advertised as “repairing” which I would take to mean “moisturizing” but that did not appear to be the case. It didn’t clean my hair very well and actually dried my hair out a little bit. I’ll stick with my $4 garnier fructis. I do like that L’Occitane has cheaper, eco-friendly refills that you can use to refill your bottles. But that is only useful if you actually like the shampoo. Which I don’t.

I also have received foil packets of both their divine eyes treatment (which is supposed to decrease dark circles and puffiness) and precious eye balm (which is supposed to tighten up the skin around your eyes and prevent wrinkles). Now, I don’t feel like I could give you a full review from only using up the little foil packet but I’ll tell you my impressions just from what I experienced (although the foil packets actually lasted longer than I thought; the precious eye balm packet lasted a week and the divine eyes about two weeks). After about a week of use the divine eyes definitely made a bigger difference in my dark circles but it left the skin around my eyes a little greasy and made my eyes kind of dry and sore feeling. Plus it didn’t do much for my puffiness and for $72 (!) for .5 oz I just can’t see myself buying the full product. I might, however buy the full sized precious eye balm. If it was on sale. Its $38 for .5 oz and didn’t do as much for dark circles but did more for the puffiness. A few minutes after you put it on you can feel it tightening up. It also soaked in very quickly and left no greasy residue. Plus its half the price of the divine eye treatment.


I was really disappointed by the shampoo, conditioner and shower gels. L’Occitane is a popular brand and I love their hand cream so I was not expecting to hate their other products so much. Of course there are other shampoos and body washes that I haven’t tried but I don’t think I will be trying them. If you want to buy any of these products to try them out for yourself you can find them at usa.loccitane.com. Also, you can sign up for a free 1 Oz hand cream by liking them on Facebook (www.facebook.com/loccitane.usa/app_194652767264993). You will get an email where it will give you’re your voucher. You can either go to a boutique to get your free hand cream with your printed voucher or you can order it online and use a code to get a free hand cream with your $25 purchase.