This product is listed as being an 'aromatic body butter.' Body butters are usually sold in tubs (occasionally tubes, but that's rare) and are the thickest variety of the lotion family. Because this lotion is so thick and dense you really only need a little bit of it and it's more intended for areas of the skin that are dry or in need of some extra healing.

While this is intended to be marketed towards women, men are perfectly welcome to indulge in this body product. Venus does make a scent called 'man' that I assume is supposed to appeal to people with "Y" chromosomes (or people with two X's who feel they should have a Y) but if the guys would prefer a different scent no one on here's going to judge them.

This lotion is best used right out of the shower. After you take a warm shower (and use soap, if that's what floats your boat) your pores are open and clean. When you apply this lotion right out of the shower it seeps in much deeper than if you apply it in the middle of the day.

This lotion is great to use daily to keep your skin soft and healthy, but you also can use it to freshen up before you go out, especially on your hands. I also like to use it on my legs after shaving to make them feel a bit softer without making them look oily.

The ingredients are as follows, I have bolded any common allergens;

Shea butter, Almond oil, Dead Sea minerals, Octyl palmitate, Ceteareth 20, Ceteraryl alcohol, Propylene glycol, Steareth 30, Ceteth 10, Vitamin e, carbomer, Methyl paraben, Diazolidinyl urea, fragrance

Parabens aren't the best thing to be rubbing onto your skin, but the only real way to have an adverse reaction is if you are allergic. Especially because this contains parabens, you should do a spot test on a small area of skin before you decide to rub this all over your body.

This lotion is thick, and if I hold the tub upside down it doesn't drip at all. If I touch my finger to the tip of it and pull it up, I get a fair amount of lotion on my finger and it leaves a peak where I had made contact. I sort of want to say that it resembles the viscosity of a thin icing.

When you first smear this onto your skin it does leave a milky color over where you put it. As you smooth this out over a wider area, the color completely goes away and it doesn't leave your skin looking colored or oily at all. After a few seconds it doesn't feel moist to the touch.

After applying this is doesn't leave any residue at all on my skin, but it does leave it much softer than before I applied it. I really like that it doesn't leave it greasy so it doesn't LOOK like you just put on lotion, but the pleasant scent lasts for a while anyways. I also feel like this makes it better for men who don't really want to look oiled up and sexy most of the time.

Do I like this scent? Did the sun come up today? YES I like the scent! When I first started considering this line of products, I was immediately drawn to the scent 'milk.' While I hate milk to drink and it gives me a tummyache, I associate it conceptually with warmth, and creamy earth tones. I was not let down by this product.

As soon as this opened this I almost yelled from excitement; it smells like almonds. I love the scent of almonds more than any other aroma I've ever found, and here it's mixed in with a bit of an oatmeal-y and vanilla-y undertone. I wish that they advertised that this was almond-y in nature because I wouldn't have waited this long to get myself a jar.

When you first apply this lotion the scent is fairly strong. When I apply it to my hands and I'm typing at the computer I am still able to swoon at the sweet almondy-ness this leaves behind. After about 15 minutes it starts to fade, and after about 25 minutes I can only smell it when I put my skin up to my nose.

Because most of the ingredients aren't meant to be handled by your digestive tract, I wouldn't recommend ingesting this product. Eden has lots of tasty massage creams and lubes that are fine to eat, but even though this smells sweet and creamy it just leaves a funny, gunky feel in your mouth.

As a lotion, I feel like the length it lasts really depends on what activities you're performing and where you apply this to. When applied to rough, dry areas like the elbows, knees, and the bottoms of my feel I felt like it kept them soft and moisturized for about half of the day. After that my skin had sucked up all of the moisture and was asking for more lotion. After using this for a few days it has become less and less often that I feel the need to reapply this lotion (for practical purposes, not for the scent.)

After washing my hands with soap and water I feel like it really washes most of this lotion off. Because of this you may want to look into something more long-lasting or something you can carry with you if you have a job where you're always washing your hands.

On my legs after shaving? This product lasted all day and only needed reapplication when I got back out of the shower. I feel like that if you have normal to oily skin and you don't need a lot of moisture, one application will do you fine until the next day.

Because this is easy to wash off, if you either hate the scent or find that it's irritating the skin soap and water remove it easily. Wiping it with a towel does nothing to remove it, but it also fades fairly well on it's own if it's the scent that is bothering you.

This lotion comes in a wide tub made of hard plastic. The jar itself is transparent, but the top is made of hard plastic and is more matte than shiny. The label wraps around the transparent part of the bottle that holds the product and is clear, ivory, and white. It does have a bit of an image of a naked woman, but it's very obscured by a white silhouette of the same image.

There is a small blurb about the product (one sentence long) in both English and Spanish. It also lists all of the ingredients and their website url. On the side is also their mailing address, the fact that it's made in the USA, and some warnings.

While I would be careful not to drop it, it doesn't leak and it's very sturdy. I feel fine tossing it into an overnighter or my bag if I'm going swimming, but I may not take it on the plane or somewhere it's going to get smushed or bumped around a lot.

OH GOSH I love this lotion. Just a brief history of me and almond scented products that you may or may not care about:

Four years ago at a craft fair I smelled some almond scented lotion and I fell in love, but to my dismay the man was only selling it with some almond scented soaps and other products for way more money than I had. I ran back the next year with the cash because I just couldn't get the scent out of my mind, but he no longer made it. Since then I have been buying everything in almond scents that I can find and hoarding it because I love the sweet, nutty, creamy smell.

This is tied with Island Hopping by Not Soap Radio as my favorite lotion ever. They both are hard to compare because this lotion is much lighter and you need more of it to cover your body, but on the other hand it does absorb faster into my skin and leaves a bit less of a residue.

If you don't mind parabens (they're very low in the list of ingredients, so they aren't very concentrated in this product) and you aren't allergic to any of the other ingredients, you NEED to give this lotion a try. A 5-star product in my book.