It’s difficult to think of a retailer with a more ubiquitous presence on mall directories than Bath & Body Works. I myself have fond memories of digging through the hand-sanitizer bins as a tween in search of the perfect scent to loop onto my backpack. (Sun-Ripened Raspberry, anyone?) Since the first Bath & Body Works opened in 1990, the company has built a devoted following dedicated to obsessively tracking and collecting the brand’s candles, body sprays, lotions, and hand soaps — all of which are available in a dizzying array of fragrance options and released at a seemingly breakneck pace.
Whether you’ve been a fan since the beginning or can’t enter the store without feeling queasy (but want to buy gifts for folks who can’t quit their Warm Vanilla Sugar fragrance mist), making sense of the vast Bath & Body Works lineup can get overwhelming quickly. That’s especially true in the face of endless promotion cycles and a confusing coupon policy.
So to get the low-down on the products that are actually worth it, which candles are the most in demand in 2023, and how to snag the best deals, I reached out to seven Bath & Body Works employees (who spoke on condition of anonymity) about the top-selling scent they’re instructed to push onto hapless boyfriends, the best places to find discontinued or long-gone products, and the perils and pitfalls of shopping the retailer’s website instead of showing up to the store.
Home products mostly deserve the hype …
The full range of Bath & Body Works products can be roughly divided into two categories: body care and home care. The former contains fragrance mists, creams and lotions, shampoo and conditioner, body wash and shower gels, and lip products, while the latter contains candles, soaps, sanitizers, and air fresheners, including ones that plug into an outlet called wallflowers. Nearly every employee I spoke to says they’ll use their employee discount the most on hand soaps and candles. “I use a candle warmer instead of lighting it, so one candle has lasted me over seven months,” says one associate. They’re also great for gifting: “I have a little sister in school, so I give all the teachers a three-wick candle and a soap, and they’re good to go,” says another.
Car air fresheners and wallflowers, however, can be a bit more hit or miss, with three associates noting that the scents tend to have weak throws (meaning the distance that an aroma will spread throughout a space) and fade quickly. “You’re probably going to have to put two or more in your car,” says one associate of the air fresheners, so they can’t justify the $4.95 price. The wallflowers aren’t much better: “I have one in my bathroom that’s at the halfway point that I barely smell anymore,” another says, with a third adding that they can sometimes leak, “and that stuff is messy and sticky and just gross.”
… and body care is more hit or miss.
Multiple Bath & Body Works associates mentioned that they never touch the brand’s body care, with several calling out the shower gel and body cream as particularly not worth the money. “It goes bad fast and feels greasy,” said one associate of the body cream, and another noted that the shower gels are “pretty drying” because they don’t contain as many moisturizing ingredients as some other brands. Even the fine fragrance sprays, which are a top seller, a couple associates think are a bum deal. “I used to be into them, but I never ever get through them and it feels very wasteful. I’ll try to give extra mists to friends instead of them just sitting in my closet or getting tossed,” one says. “A lot of the sprays are reaching that $18, $19 price point, but they don’t have a lot of oil in them, so they don’t last very long,” another adds. “Instead of buying ten Bath & Body Works sprays, you can buy a Tom Ford perfume.”
But lip products are a hidden gem.
“We sell a lot of lip products, and people just don’t really pay attention to them. They don’t get the love that they should,” one associate told me, praising the lip scrubs as “very moisturizing and not harsh,” the lip masks because they “aren’t chemical-tasting and work really well,” and the lip glosses because they’re “really pigmented and feel nice.” That associate has fully switched over from wearing nude lipstick everyday to using Bath & Body Works’ lip tints. “It’s not as thick as a lipstick, but it still lasts a really long time and it’s much cheaper.”
Older shoppers like floral scents; younger ones are more fruit-forward.
Most associates told me their customer base is overwhelmingly female and that the majority of shoppers are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s — though they go down to tweens and all the way up to folks in their 60s. Every associate I spoke to had noticed a difference in buying habits and favorite products between younger and older shoppers. “Older people love the light, powdery, perfume-y floral scents,” one said, calling out Moonlight Path, Pure Wonder, and Japanese Cherry Blossom, a core offering that’s been around since 2005 and has enjoyed a long run as a customer favorite. Another associate told me that these customers in their 30s and 40s tend to buy more candles, lotions, and wallflowers, and don’t usually go for anything new “like that shape-able soap or lip scrubs.”
Gen-Z-ers, meanwhile, snap up the sanitizers and body sprays and prefer more “fun” scents that lean sweet and fruity, like Among the Clouds or Berry Waffle Cone. They’re also more likely to try new releases — for Halloween, the brand released a special Vampire Blood scent (which, in case you’re wondering, smells of berries, jasmine, and plum), and multiple associates said it flew off the shelves. A raspberry-and-vanilla scent called Butterfly, which debuted in March 2022 as a seasonal spring offering, was such a hit among the teens that it was added to the core collection.
When in doubt, go with Champagne Toast.
Six of the seven employees I spoke to mentioned Champagne Toast as one of the most popular fragrances and a consistent best seller. Bath & Body Works describes the scent as a “fruity, sweet, sparkling spritzer” with notes of bubbly champagne, sparkling berries, and juicy tangerine — pretty much a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. One associate revealed that whenever a clueless boyfriend or husband wanders in looking for a present for their significant other, they’ll direct them to the Champagne Toast gift sets. “They see it’s pink [and girly], so they’re like, I have to get this. We put out so many Champagne Toast gift sets for the holidays because they know men will just buy that for their girlfriend,” the employee explained.
Shopping in-store is the way to go …
Though Bath & Body Works has built a fairly robust e-commerce site, all the employees I talked to said that stopping by your local mall is the best way to shop so that you can sniff scents in-person and test products on your skin. And while shopping online might make sense if you’re looking to snag an internet-exclusive product or use an online-only coupon, they warned that you’ll have to do multiple transactions if you want to use more than one coupon, which are strictly one-per-order online. (Coupons can sometimes stack when used in-store — but more on that below.)
A small benefit of shopping the website is that sometimes items will be marked down online before they go on clearance in-store. But if you’re having items shipped, temper your expectations. Orders aren’t packed and shipped from your local Bath & Body Works store; they’re sent out from giant warehouses, and many associates mentioned that customers frequently complain about orders arriving with broken or incorrect items. One facility located in Texas is a serial offender: “For some reason, when they ship candles from that plant, they just don’t pack them right, and they always seem to break,” one associate said. “That’s the problem, you don’t know which warehouse these products are coming from and whether they’re going to get there intact.” Another associate cautioned that you should only have items shipped “as an absolute last resort” because “shipping is a sure way to have the worst shopping experience ever.”
… but if you must buy online, choose BOPIS.
BOPIS stands for “Buy Online, Pick-up In Store,” and it’s what several associates do when shopping the website for themselves — especially during hectic sales periods. Once placed, your order will be held in a back room for five days, so you can drop by and scoop it up at your leisure. “I love doing a BOPIS order because it’s convenient to add things to my cart and just pick them up later when I’m running errands,” says one associate. They’ll use BOPIS to “restock my favorites or get fragrances I tried in-store but decided to wait on,” helping cut down on returns and exchanges.
The coupon policy can get confusing.
Bath & Body Works offers coupons in three formats: physical mail, email, and through the official Bath & Body Works app. Unsurprisingly, multiple associates say their most frequently asked questions have to do with coupons: how they can be redeemed, how many can be used at once, and so on.
When it comes to in-store shopping, “paper coupons from the mail cannot be combined with electronic coupons on the app or email, but multiple paper coupons can be used on one transaction if they are from the same mailer,” one associate explained. Bath & Body Works has also started linking its paper coupons with in-app coupons, which means that if you used the paper one, you’ve used the one on your app. Expired coupons cannot be accepted, and coupons can only be redeemed once.
With that said, the coupon policy appears to be unevenly applied from store to store, which can create a lot of uncertainty and frustration for customers. Even though paper and electronic coupons aren’t supposed to be combined, one associate told me that the system at their store will let them scan in both at the same time, and sometimes cashiers make mistakes, especially if they’re a new or seasonal hire who hasn’t been fully trained. Sometimes this means customers get lucky and score an especially good deal on one purchase, only to be disappointed the next. Another associate who’s known as the “top dog” at their store for managing coupon confusion says they’re not shy about being “the villain.” A customer “will say, Oh, a different store let me do this. Well, that’s because they can’t read,” they explain.
If you’re hell-bent on getting the best deal possible, associates highly suggest downloading the app and joining Bath & Body Works’ rewards program, so that even if you move addresses or lose physical copies, all your coupons will still show up in-app. But no matter which coupons you plan to use, make sure you’re signed up for the rewards program and have them ready to go before you get in line to check out. “People at the register will go on their phone and just type in ‘Bath & Body Works coupons’ on Google and hand me the phone,” one associate says. “Ma’am, I’m sorry but it doesn’t work like that!”
The return policy is stricter than it used to be.
In the past, Bath & Body Works’ return policy was that no matter how old or used a product was, you could exchange it for a new product for free. “My boss told me stories of people bringing in bags full of completely empty candles claiming they didn’t like them,” one associate said. For a while, taking advantage of this policy even became a TikTok trend, where people would walk in with empty bottles and walk out with brand-new products and a five-foot-long receipt.
That all changed in August 2022, when the retailer cracked down and amended the policy. (A common practice among retailers these days.) Now, items can only be returned if they’re “gently used” at most and have not been defaced. (For example, a barcode that’s been tampered with counts as a defacement.) Of course, “gently used” is subject to interpretation, and can differ from store to store. “I think they used [the vague verbiage] intentionally, depending on the needs of each store and how their customers are operating,” said one associate. But most of the people I talked to define it as at least half of the product still remaining.
It’s always ideal to have a receipt when making a return or exchange, but if you don’t have one, you’ll likely be asked to present your ID. The policy that one associate must follow, which according to the Bath & Body Works website applies to “select stores,” is that all non-receipted returns or exchanges have a $250 limit within 90 days, and if you hit it, you won’t be able to make any additional returns until the period is over.
One-to-one exchanges, where one product is exchanged for another product of the same type with the same sticker price, are generally fuss-free — but that’s also subject to the store and the individual associate. “If someone’s having a bad day or whatever, I’ll sometimes make an exception, but technically speaking it’s supposed to be the exact same price,” one associate says. They also added that the one product their store does not accept exchanges for, full-stop, is wallflowers: “You can’t really gauge how long they’ve had it for. Sometimes people will have a wallflower that we haven’t sold in four years, but they’ll say it just broke. So we stopped taking them altogether,” the associate explains.
Plan ahead for the big sales.
It can seem like Bath & Body Works is always running one promotion or another, but its tentpole sales event is the Semi-Annual Sale, which happens twice a year and typically lasts for about a month: once in the summer starting in early June, and once in the winter starting the day after Christmas. The brand will discount products by up to 60 percent to offload items that are seasonal, on the verge of being discontinued, or due for a reformulation or packaging update.
Semi-Annual Sales are also when Bath & Body Works will sometimes bring back rare or previously discontinued scents for a limited time — “Cucumber Melon came back this past Semi-Annual and people were stuffing bags full of products,” one associate recalled. The retailer’s other big sales day is Candle Day, which takes place the first weekend of December; shoppers can expect to see discounts on the first drop of spring and summer candles and even some special-edition candles.
The best way to prepare for a big Bath & Body Works sale is to go in knowing what you like: “You won’t know what products are going to be a part of the sale ahead of time, but if you have an idea of fragrance notes that you like, it’ll be easier to assist you,” one associate advised. Others stressed the importance of not dillydallying: “If there’s something you really want, get it ASAP because it will sell out,” I was told. However, stock can vary greatly from store to store, so if your local store has sold out of a certain product on your wish list, it’s worth checking other nearby locations.
Old favorites are hiding in the outlets.
Bath & Body Works has nearly 100 outlet stores nationwide, where discounts can be as high as 75 percent off, but most of the products are fairly old — from at least a year or two back. That’s where one associate will send customers who come in inquiring about a scent from 2007 — the outlets will “have Easter stuff from ages ago, stuff no regular store has,” they said. But if you’re hoping to find a deep-cut scent from a past era, whether at an official outlet store or on resale websites, consider what type of product it is before you put in the time. Items like wallflowers or body sprays, which contain alcohol, will likely be fine, but body cream and other moisturizing products that contain ingredients like shea butter can oxidize, separate, or change colors after they’ve sat on the shelf for too long.
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