Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream Intensive Moisturizing Body Treatment Review

Elizabeth Arden sells two Eight Hour products with 'Intensive Moisturizing' on the front, and they could hardly be more different. The hand treatment is a light cold-cream lotion with no oils, no butters and no glycerin. This body treatment has shea butter second in the ingredient list, directly after water, glycerin fourth, sodium hyaluronate in the middle and cholesterol near the end. One of them earns the adjective and the other borrows it, and reading the two lists side by side is the quickest education available in what actually makes a moisturizer moisturize.

Start with the shea. A butter placed second in a water-based cream is a serious load, and it shows: the product comes out of the tub thick, ivory and whipped, drags slightly as it spreads, and warms into the skin over a minute or two before settling to a cushioned satin. Shea supplies stearic and oleic acids and the triterpene unsaponifiables that give it a documented softening effect on dry skin, and here it is backed by a dense network of myristyl myristate, cetyl esters and fatty alcohols that add body and slip. Glycerin does the humectant work, pulling water into the outer skin for the shea to hold, and sodium hyaluronate adds a little surface water-binding. Cholesterol, nineteenth in the list, is a small nod toward barrier lipids. Imperata cylindrica, a desert-grass extract sold to formulators on a long-lasting-hydration story, sits fourteenth as the botanical flourish. It is a conventional, well-built body cream with the right things in the right places.

In use it does what the brand's 50-person panel reported: immediate relief on dry skin, and visibly less flaking within a couple of weeks. Winter shins, elbows and knees, the places that go grey and rough in January, respond well to a daily scoop applied to damp skin after a shower, and the softness holds through the day rather than vanishing by lunch. A tub lasts three or four months of full-body use, and for anyone who reserves it for legs and arms, considerably longer. This is the Eight Hour product to buy for dry body skin, and it is a better cream than the hand treatment by every measure that matters.

The caveats are the ones the whole range shares, plus one specific to the base. The Eight Hour fragrance is here in full, with citral, citronellol, geraniol, limonene and linalool declared, and on a product applied over the whole body every day that is a substantial allergen exposure for anyone with sensitive or eczema-prone skin; the scent is part of the appeal for the brand's devotees and a reason to skip for everyone else. The specific caveat is the esters. Myristyl myristate sits fifth and octyldodecyl myristate ninth, and both have a reputation for clogging pores on breakout-prone chests and backs. On limbs that is irrelevant; on a torso that breaks out, this cream is a plausible trigger, and it should stay below the collarbone. The tub is the other practical grumble: a wide screw-top jar scooped by hand is fine at home and less fine in a gym bag, and fingers in a tub of shea for four months is not the most hygienic arrangement. Cyclopentasiloxane and dimethicone are present for slip and are harmless; BHT preserves the esters; there are no parabens.

What the cream does not do is seal like the original Eight Hour salve. There is no petrolatum here, and for genuinely cracked heels or fissured elbows the little tube of the classic, or any petrolatum balm, is the tool; this is a rich daily moisturizer, not a protectant. It is also not a treatment for anything beyond dryness, and the 'intensive' promise, properly understood, means rich rather than corrective.

On price, fifty-five dollars for 400 ml is prestige body-cream money but not outrageous: the tub lasts months, the monthly cost is modest, and the formula, while conventional, is richer than most pharmacy body lotions and comparable to the better body butters. The premium over those is the Eight Hour name, the figure-eight tub and the scent; the value score sits in the middle because the cream earns a fair share of what it costs, which in this franchise is not always the case.

The cream has been in the Eight Hour line for two decades, with thousands of ratings that agree on the essentials: thick, nourishing, lasts all day, lasts for months, smells like Eight Hour, and an occasional itch or breakout from the people it was never right for.

If you have dry body skin, love the Eight Hour scent and want a rich tub cream for winter, this is the one in the range to buy, and it will do the job. If your skin is sensitive or your back breaks out, the fragrance and the esters are reasons to choose a plainer shea cream. And if what you need is a seal on cracked heels, reach past this tub for the original.