It’s hard to think of a retailer more ubiquitous in mall directories than Bath & Body Works. I myself have fond memories of rummaging through the hand sanitizer containers as a teenager to find the perfect scent for my backpack. (Sun-Ripened Raspberry, anyone?) Since the first Bath & Body Works opened in 1990, the company has built a loyal following that obsessively tracks and collects the brand’s candles, body sprays, lotions and hand soaps—all of which come in a dizzying array of scent options and are released at a seemingly breakneck pace.
Whether you’ve been a fan since day one or can’t walk into the store without feeling queasy (but want to buy gifts for people who can’t get enough of their Warm Vanilla Sugar air freshener), navigating Bath & Body Works’ massive product lineup can quickly become overwhelming. That’s especially true with endless promotion cycles and a confusing coupon policy.
To find out which products are really worth the money, which candles will be most in-demand in 2023, and how to get the best deals, I asked seven Bath & Body Works employees (who spoke on the condition of anonymity) which best-selling fragrance to pitch to their hapless friends, where to find discontinued or long-gone products, and the dangers and pitfalls of shopping on the retailer’s website rather than showing up in-store.
Household products usually deserve the hype...
Bath & Body Works’ entire product lineup can be roughly divided into two categories: personal care and home care. The former includes scented sprays, creams and lotions, shampoo and conditioner, shower gels and lip products, while the latter includes candles, soaps, sanitizers and air fresheners, including ones that plug into an outlet called “wallflowers.” Almost all of the employees I spoke to say they use their employee discount most often on hand soaps and candles. “I use a candle warmer instead of lighting them, so one candle has lasted me over seven months,” says one employee. They also make great gifts: “I have a little sister at school, so I give all the teachers a three-wick candle and a soap and they’re set,” says another.
Bath & Body Works Paris Café Three-Wick Candle
Bath & Body Works Kitchen Lemon Gentle & Clean Foaming Hand Soap
Bath & Body Works In The Stars Wallflowers Fragrance Refill
Car air fresheners and Wallflowers can be a bit more hit and miss, however, with three employees noting that the scents tend to have weak range (the distance an aroma spreads in a room) and dissipate quickly. “You’ll probably have to put two or more in your car,” one employee says of the air fresheners, so they can’t justify the $4.95 price tag. The Gold Wallflowers aren’t much better: “I have one in my bathroom that’s half empty and I can barely smell it anymore,” another says, and a third adds that they sometimes leak, “and that stuff is dirty and sticky and just gross.”
...and personal care is more hit and miss.
Several Bath & Body Works employees mentioned that they never touch the brand’s personal care, with several calling the shower gel and body cream particularly not worth the money. “It goes bad quickly and feels greasy,” one employee said of the body cream, and another noted that the shower gels are “quite drying” because they don’t contain as many moisturizing ingredients as some other brands. Even the fine fragrance sprays, which are a top seller, are considered a bad deal by a few employees. “I used to like them, but I never use them up and it seems very wasteful to me. I try to give leftover sprays to friends instead of just leaving them in my closet or throwing them away,” one says. “Many sprays are between $18 and $19, but they don’t have much oil in them, so they don’t last very long,” another adds. “Instead of buying ten sprays from Bath & Body Works, you can buy a Tom Ford perfume.”
Bath & Body Works Vanilla Bean Noel Ultimate Hydration Body Cream
Bath & Body Works Vanilla Lip Gloss
“We sell a lot of lip products, but people just don’t really pay attention to them. They don’t get the attention they deserve,” one employee told me, praising the lip scrubs for being “very hydrating and not harsh,” the lip masks for “not tasting chemical and working really well,” and the lip glosses for being “really pigmented and feeling good.” This employee has completely switched from wearing nude lipstick every day to Bath & Body Works lip tints. “They’re not as thick as lipstick, but they still last a long time and are much cheaper.”
Older shoppers like floral scents; younger shoppers prefer fruity ones.
Most employees told me that their customer base is predominantly female and that the majority of shoppers are in their 20s, 30s and 40s – although there are also people in their tweens and up to people in their 60s. Every employee 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-like floral scents,” one said, naming Moonlight Path, Pure Wonder and Japanese Cherry Blossom, a core offering that has been around since 2005 and has long been a customer favorite. Another employee told me that these customers, in their 30s and 40s, are more likely to buy candles, lotions and gold polish and don’t typically buy anything new “like that moldable soap or lip scrubs.”
Gen Z, on the other hand, buys sanitizer and body sprays and prefers “more fun” scents that are sweet and fruity, like “Among the Clouds” or “Berry Waffle Cone.” They’re also more likely to try new products—for Halloween, the brand released a special scent called “Vampire Blood” (which, in case you’re wondering, smells like berries, jasmine and plum), and several employees said it sold like hotcakes. A raspberry-vanilla scent called “Butterfly,” which launched in March 2022 as a seasonal spring offering, was so popular with teens that it was added to the core collection.
Bath & Body Works Moonlight Path Ultimate Hydration Body Cream
Bath & Body Works Pure Wonder Daily Nourishing Body Lotion
Bath & Body Works Champagne Toast Gift Bag Set
Six of the seven employees I spoke with named Champagne Toast as one of the most popular scents and a consistent best seller. Bath & Body Works describes the scent as “fruity, sweet, sparkling” with notes of sparkling champagne, bubbly berries and juicy tangerine—pretty much a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. One employee revealed that whenever an unsuspecting boyfriend or husband walks in looking for a gift for their better half, they point them to the Champagne Toast gift sets. “They see it’s pink [and girly], so they think I have to buy that. We put out so many Champagne Toast gift sets for the holidays because they know that’s just what guys buy for their girlfriend,” the employee explained.
Shopping in store is the best way...
Although Bath & Body Works has built a pretty robust e-commerce site, every employee I spoke to said the best way to shop is to visit the local mall so you can smell scents in person and test products on your skin. And while shopping online can make sense if you want to snag an internet-exclusive product or use an online-only coupon, they warned that you’ll need to make multiple transactions if you want to use more than one coupon, since online is strictly only valid once per order. (Coupons can sometimes stack when used in store—but more on that later.)
One small benefit of shopping through the website is that items are sometimes discounted online before they go on sale in the store. If you’re having items delivered, though, temper your expectations. Orders aren’t packaged and shipped at your local Bath & Body Works store; they’re shipped from massive warehouses, and many employees mentioned that customers often complain about orders arriving with broken or incorrect items. One facility in Texas is a serial offender: “For some reason, the candles they ship from this factory just don’t get packaged properly, and they always seem to break,” one employee said. “That’s the problem, you don’t know what warehouse these products are coming from and if they’re going to get there undamaged.” Another employee warned that you should only have items delivered “as a very last resort,” as “shipping is the surest way to have the worst shopping experience ever.”
...but if you absolutely must buy online, choose BOPIS.
BOPIS stands for “Buy Online, Pick-up In Store,” and that’s what several employees do when shopping for themselves on the site—especially during busy sales periods. Once you place your order, it’s held in a back room for five days, so you can stop by and pick it up at your leisure. “I like doing BOPIS orders because it’s convenient to put things in my cart and pick them up later when I’m running errands,” says one employee. They use BOPIS to “stock up on my favorite items or buy scents I tried in the store but preferred to wait,” which helps reduce returns and exchanges.
The coupon policy can be confusing.
Bath & Body Works offers coupons in three formats: mailed, emailed, and through the official Bath & Body Works app. Not surprisingly, several employees say their most frequently asked questions have to do with coupons: how to redeem them, how many can be used at once, and so on.
When shopping in-store, “paper coupons from the mail cannot be combined with electronic coupons from the app or email, but multiple paper coupons can be used for one transaction if they come from the same sender,” one employee explained. Bath & Body Works has also started linking its paper coupons to in-app coupons, meaning that if you’ve used the paper coupon, you’ve also used the one in your app. Expired coupons aren’t accepted, and coupons can only be redeemed once.
However, the coupon policy seems to be handled differently from store to store, which can cause a lot of uncertainty and frustration among customers. Although paper and electronic coupons aren’t supposed to be combined, one employee told me that the system at their store allows them to scan both at the same time, and that cashiers sometimes make mistakes, especially when they’re new or seasonal employees who haven’t been fully trained. Sometimes that means customers get lucky and get a particularly good deal on one purchase, only to be disappointed on the next. Another employee, known as the “top dog” at their store for solving coupon confusion, says they’re not afraid to be “the bad guy.” A customer “will then say, ‘Oh, I could have done that at another store.’ That’s because they can’t read,” he explains.
If you’re desperate to get the best deal possible, employees strongly recommend downloading the app and enrolling in Bath & Body Works’ rewards program so all of your coupons will still show up in the app even if you move or lose physical copies. But no matter what coupons you plan to use, make sure you’re signed up for the rewards program and have them ready before you line up at the checkout. “People at the checkout line will take their phone, just Google ‘Bath & Body Works coupons’ and hand me the phone,” one employee says. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works!”
Return policies are stricter than they used to be.
In the past, Bath & Body Works’ return policy meant that you could exchange a product, no matter how old or used, for a new product for free. “My boss told me stories of people returning bags full of completely empty candles, claiming they didn’t like them,” one employee said. For a while, using this policy even became a TikTok trendend: People came in with empty bottles and left with brand new products and a 5-foot-long receipt.
That changed in August 2022, when the retailer cracked down and changed the policy. (A common practice among retailers these days.) Now, items can only be returned if they’ve been “lightly used” at most and not defaced. (For example, a tampered barcode counts as defacement.) Of course, “lightly used” is a matter of interpretation and can vary from store to store. “I think they used [the vague wording] intentionally, depending on the needs of each store and the way their customers operate,” one employee said. But most people I’ve spoken to define it as having at least half of the product left.
It’s always ideal to have a receipt with you when making a return or exchange, but if you don’t have one, you’ll likely be asked to show your ID. The policy an employee must follow, which applies to “select stores,” according to Bath & Body Works’ website, states that there is a $250 limit on all returns or exchanges without a receipt within 90 days. If you reach that limit, you can’t make any more returns until the period is up.
One-for-one exchanges, where one product is exchanged for another product of the same type with the same price, are generally straightforward—but that also depends on the store and the individual employee. “If someone is having a bad day or something, sometimes I’ll make an exception, but technically it’s supposed to be the exact same price,” one employee says. He also added that the only product his store won’t accept exchanges for at all is gold polish: “You can’t really tell how long they’ve had it. Sometimes people have a gold polish that we haven’t sold in four years, but they say it just broke. So we don’t take them at all anymore,” the employee explains.
Plan ahead for the big sales.
It may seem like Bath & Body Works is always running one promotion or another, but its main sales event is its semi-annual sale, which happens twice a year and usually lasts about a month: once in the summer, starting in early June, and once in the winter, starting the day after Christmas. The brand discounts products as much as 60 percent to get rid of items that are seasonal, about to be discontinued, or in line for a reformulation or packaging update.
Bath & Body Works Cucumber Melon Fine Fragrance Mist
Semi-annual sales are also the time when Bath & Body Works sometimes brings back rare or previously discontinued scents for a limited time—”Cucumber Melon came back at the last semi-annual sale, and people stuffed bags full of product,” one employee recalled. The retailer’s other big sale day is Candle Day, which takes place the first weekend in December; shoppers can expect discounts on early spring and summer candles and even some special edition candles.
The best way to prepare for a big Bath & Body Works sale is to know what you like: “You don’t know in advance what products will be included in the sale, but if you have an idea of what scents you like, it’ll be easier for us to help you,” one employee advised. Others stressed the importance of not dawdling: “If you really want something, get it as soon as you can because it will sell out,” I was told. Inventory can vary widely from store to store, though, so if your local store is sold out of a particular product on your wish list, check other stores nearby.
Old favorites hide in the outlets.
Bath & Body Works has nearly 100 outlet stores nationwide where discounts of up to 75 percent are possible, but most of the products are pretty old—at least a year or two old. That’s where an employee sends customers who ask for a scent from 2007 — the outlets “have Easter stuff from a long time ago, stuff that no regular store has,” he said. But if you’re hoping to find a deep-rooted scent from a bygone era, whether at an official outlet store or on resale websites, consider what kind of product it is before you take the time to go. Items like gold lacquer or body sprays that contain alcohol will probably be fine, but body cream and other moisturizing products that contain ingredients like shea butter can oxidize, separate or change color if left to dry. stay on the shelf for a long time.
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