For the Love of Body Butters + Basting
One brand's skin deep line of lush moisturizing butters wants to save your skin this season.
This past weekend Fall quietly laid her coat across the couch and placed her boots on the shoe rack to announce she is going to settle in and stay a while. We have entered my favorite season whereby we collectively switch over from simply using lotions and oils and begin baste ourselves in butters—creamy, thick but light and heavenly-scented butters—to become vacuums for moisture as best we can. And I’ve recently come across a luscious brand that is absorbing far more than my coins.
Much like lip gloss or chap sticks, my tubes and bottles of body butters lie littered throughout my personal and private spaces for ease of access: there’s the bathroom sink butter, the bedroom dresser tub, the nearly-empty hand creme at the bottom of my purse, one hidden at the back of the kitchen junk drawer, the coat pocket butter, and because I’m commuting into the office a few days a week now, there’s one in the glove compartment. Because I shant be out here in a Minnesota winter like my hands been tossing flour all day. Still with all these little locations and compartment, I’m convinced two of three of these tubs conspire to get lost almost monthly.
Thus my happy sojourn to one of those magical gourmet food stores that doesn’t have aisles so much as vignettes and corners stocked with specialty foods and oils and soaps and spices from small vendors this past Sunday. In St. Paul there is such a place called the Golden Fig Fine Foods, a charming necessary gem in a charming neighborhood that feels like you are discovering a little corner shop down a side alley in Paris. While perusing, I picked up the scent “Ocean & Oakmoss” by the brand Formulary 55, and lightly inhaled a serene but deep expression of the ocean and salt, aloe and sunflower. I love a body butter that has soft notes of flowers and herbs but doesn’t sting your nostrils the moment you inhale because it’s so sharp and unbalanced it blows your senses. The Ocean and Oakmoss was already delicate, and then I spread a bit on the back of my hand and was elated to feel how it absorbed into my skin rather than just sat on top like an oily film. I’m weary of moisturizers categorized as “silky” because I’ve found that to mean my fingers are coated in a greasy residue that makes my skin feel slippery, not well hydrated.
Made in Colorado, Formulary 55’s scents come in bath soaps, hand creams, body butters, masks, mists and candles. The body creams run about $24 for a 4oz, but because a small amount goes a long way in moisturizing, you can maximum each jar. Or do like me and buy one for every crevice of your space.
Nicole