Review: The So-Called Chocomania “Scrub”

Sorry to break the news, but the times where you could hide your flaky winter skin under tights and woolen jumpers are over. But don’t worry, I’ve tested and reviewed a few of the most popular scrubs out there on the market, so that you can tackle those pesky dry spots a.s.a.p. 🙂

When I chose to buy a Body Shop body scrub back in January, I was mainly drawn in by the products’ amazing scents. At the time I made the purchase, it was still crispy cold and snowy outside, so I could not resist the warmth of Chocomania scrub (14 € for 200 ml), which smells like the perfect chocolate cake batter. Needless to say that in terms of fragrancing, The Body Shop has done an amazing job once more: Even if you don’t like food scnets, there will be the right product for everybody at every time of the year.

To stay with the pros for a bit longer, the Chocomania scrub is packed with amazing nourishing ingredients such as sunflower seed oil, soybean oil, cocoa seed butter and brazil nut oil which stick to your skin even when applied under the shower, unless of course you wash afterwards, which is not recommended. Add the scrub’s main ingredient, a palm oil-derived moisturizer called ethylhexyl palmitate that is known for leaving your skin feeling “dry slip” soft like silicone derivatives (without actually being one), and you might get an idea of just how soft and nourished your skin feels after you used the scrub.

This per se is obviously not a bad thing, but in my eyes, it helps to disguise the product’s one central weakness: The fact that it doesn’t work as a scrub! As you might be able to tell from the picture, the product is of a very soft, almost creamy consistency, with the scrubbing agents (sugar, silica and cocoa shell powder, no micro plastic though!) being hardly even perceptible to the naked eye. Whilst this might be a good thing for mechanical facial scrubs (if you want to use them at all…), it just does not make any sense for a body scrub to be this gentle! When I was testing it on my hand in the shop, I found the scrubbing agents to be quite perceptible; but under my shower, I can hardly even feel them at all when I spread the scrub on larger areas of my body. The product dissolves and thins out to an oily liquid on your wet skin, but there are just little to no scrubbing beads! If I really wanted to give myself a good scrub with noticable effects, I had to use insane quantities of products. In fact, I have only used the scrub around five times and you can see for yourselves how much is gone already.

Not to mention the mess this leaves in your shower: While you try to exfoliate your skin with heaps and heaps of scrub, the brown, liquidy-oily cocoa part of the product splashes around, leaving ugly brown stains on your walls (non-permanent) and shower curtains (permanent)…

So while the Chocomania scrub might do an excellent job as an in-shower body lotion, it sadly turns out to be a total fail as a scrub. Sorry The Body Shop, but a scrub that doesn’t scrub just does not deserve its name… 😦