My next review will be on a body lotion which I recently discovered, but before I go to that, I’d like to ask you ladies a question. Wearing perfume with non-matching scented body lotion – yay or nay?

I do not like scented products on my face, but on my body, I’d love to smell good. I love the not-over-the-top, light floral fragrance in body lotions. However, I will not slather on scented body lotion before heading to work (I need the fragrance-free ones, which aren’t an easy find for body lotions). I wear perfume to work, and somehow, scented body lotion and non-matching perfume tend to clash, regardless of how nice the individual scents are.

Let me give you an example. This has got to be one of my most embarrassing moments, but it was a valuable lesson to learn. When I was in Japan, I used a lot of The Body Shop’s Spa Wisdom African Spa Body Balm, as the humidity was very low, and my skin tend to peel very badly. I’d get excema, and the rashes would hurt terribly.

A couple of weeks later, I received an email from a colleague back home. He told me, in a very embarrassed tone, that my Malaysian colleagues in Japan told him to tell me that I stank. These were men, by the way. Men told me I smelt BAD. What could be worse?! They were too embarrassed to tell me face-to-face, but they couldn’t take the smell anymore, so they had a close colleague of mine break the bad news to me. Apparently my mixture of the cocoa butter and perfume had emitted a foul smell to them, even though I was oblivious to it all.

In short, after that incident, I never mixed perfume with scented body lotion ever again. Of course, perfume ranges with their matching body lotions are fine; the scent lasts longer that way anyway. But I’d keep the rest at bay.

What about you? Do you use scented body lotion? Better yet, do you also wear clashing ones with perfume?