The ultimate beauty bargain!
By Anna Pursglove Daily Mail UK
This £1.69 body cream will do wonders for your skin
Bottle O’Butter is taking the beauty industry by storm
Once only available in Afro-Caribbean shops, it’s now on everyone’s wish list
It’s super cheap AND will leave your skin looking lovely
When it comes to beauty products, bitter experience has taught me that price frequently has little to do with effectiveness.
In fact, many of my cut-price buys from High Street chemists and supermarkets have outperformed ‘cult’ brands that seem to deliver nothing more than pseudo-scientific credentials at inflated prices.
So when I heard this month that a cream costing just £1.69 was taking the beauty industry by storm, I wasn’t at all surprised.
Once only available in Afro and Afro-Caribbean shops and salons, a cocoa butter body cream called Bottle O’ Butter has suddenly shot to the top of every beauty must-have list.
Everyone from the beauty bloggers to the Mumsnetters is falling over themselves to give an opinion (good, on the whole) while the product is now widely available online – though at significantly hiked-up prices.
‘It’s genius on dry skin – you have to try it!’ enthused my beauty addict friend Lily, whipping a bottle from her shoulder bag in the middle of a recent barbecue.
Observing Lily’s dewy and entirely scale-free limbs, the assembled women eagerly began slathering the stuff on to knees, elbows, shins and any children who strayed into range.
‘Looks industrial,’ observed my bemused husband – a fair point given that the packaging is definitely not one of the product’s strong points.
There’s the name for starters: ‘Bottle O’ Butter’ sounds less like a pampering treat than a prop from Pirates Of The Caribbean. Then there’s the bottle’s challenging colour – reminiscent of something treated in Ronseal.
But Lily would not be silenced on the subject. The cream isn’t sticky, she promised, and doesn’t smell sickly like some cocoa butter creams do.
It’s rich (the product contains lanolin as well as cocoa butter) and would therefore be perfect to use on weather-dried skin (I’m a runner and regularly suffer from rain and wind-chapping).
Lily also advised I try using it on the children’s skin as an antidote to the irritation caused by chlorinated water in swimming pools.
I was convinced enough to go in search of my own supply. Lily, after all, knows what she’s talking about when it comes to cult products. She’s the first person I can recall using Touche Eclat back in the early Nineties and she hasn’t put an immaculate foot wrong since.
I could have had my Bottle O’ Butter delivered to my front door the following day had I ordered it online. Numerous suppliers have cottoned on to the product’s mounting popularity and are selling Bottle O’ Butter for around £7 with a further £10 added for quick delivery.
But being a sucker for a beauty bargain, I decided to try and hunt it down for myself amongst my local West London beauty salons. It turns out, however, that while Bottle O’Butter might be developing a cult online following, this hasn’t yet translated into extra piles of stock in the shops.
The girl in the local mini mart kept directing me towards the Lurpak while the nice lady in the chemist next door wasn’t selling it, but told me she had been given a bottle by her sister.
After some intensive detective work, I eventually received word that Bottle O’ Butter was being sold in a beauty salon on a side street off the main road.
Feeling like skincare’s answer to Hercule Poirot, I dashed to the address to discover a lone bottle on a back shelf, between the hair relaxers. And it was still only £1.69!
‘Very popular stuff that,’ smiled the woman behind the counter. ‘I’m going to put the price up next week. That’s my last bottle but tell your friends there’s more coming soon.’
I’m not sure I want to let them in on the secret – because my search was more than worth it.
The cream is extremely thick and rich and gives your skin a lovely, glossy sheen that – at least on me – seems to last all day. It’s a particularly welcome effect given that summer’s arrival means neglected heels, shins and decolletage must suddenly come out of hibernation.
A word of warning, however: the stuff takes ages to sink in. I found myself rubbing it into my shins for about half an hour after my shower – so no good if you’re in a rush. And it would definitely be too pore-clogging to use on your face.
In the two weeks since I’ve begun using Bottle O’ Butter several of my friends have commented on how good my skin looks.
My husband has been caught using it as after-sun lotion and even my seven-year-old son will allow it to be applied after swimming on the grounds that it ‘doesn’t smell like girls’ (it doesn’t smell of anything much). My Liz Earle Botanical Body Cream (closer to £20 than £2) meanwhile, has started gathering dust.
In fact so enamoured am I of my bargain beauty find that I’ve even started to come round to the name.
Rather than masquerading as an ‘intensive moisture delivery system’ or a ’24-hour nourishing complex’ the stuff just does what it says on the tin. And we know that particular marketing strategy has worked before now …
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