Body shimmer oil

A body shimmer oil is a body oil with light in it. The oil is usually a dry one — light esters and plant oils that spread thin and sink in quickly, rather than a heavy oil that sits on the skin. Suspended in it are fine, flat flakes of mica or, in newer formulas, borosilicate glass, coated with titanium dioxide, tin oxide or iron oxides, which reflect and refract light.^[1] Tom Ford’s Soleil Neige lists calcium sodium borosilicate among its oils, and Nuxe’s golden Huile Prodigieuse lists mica. The flakes are heavier than the oil and settle in the bottle, which is why so many labels say to shake it. Smoothed over the collarbones, shoulders and shins, they catch the light as the body moves.

It sits between skincare and makeup. It softens like any body oil but is worn to be seen. It is finer and more fluid than body glitter, which is larger particles in a gel, and sheerer than body makeup or a luminiser, which carry enough pigment to even the tone. Most are scented, some strongly, and several are the body oil of a fragrance.

Look first at the size of the flake: small platelets give a sheen, larger ones glitter.^[2] The makeup artist Fiona Stiles told The New York Times that “particle size is everything” and that “the more highly milled the shimmer is, the more believable it is on.”^[3] Then the colour. Champagne, white-gold and rose shimmers sit most quietly on fair and cool-toned skin; gold, copper and bronze warm deeper skin and a tan. Stiles’s rule was to “beware of anything too gold or too cold”.^[3] Some oils add a sheer tint or bronzer, which gives colour as well as light.

The format decides how it goes on. A dropper suits hands and small areas, a pump a whole leg, and a fine spray the back and shoulders. Oils thickened with butters sink in more slowly and are likelier to mark clothes; the driest feel like almost nothing. Consider the scent too: an oil made to match a perfume layers with it, but if you wear another fragrance, choose a lightly scented oil. None of them is a sunscreen, however much the glow suggests a beach.

Put it on last, once moisturiser has sunk in and any self-tan has developed. Shake the bottle so that the shimmer is evenly suspended, pump or drop a little into the palm, and press it over the high points — collarbones, shoulders, the fronts of the shins, the tops of the arms — rather than rubbing it everywhere: skin that catches the light looks lit, while shimmer all over looks flat. Blend the edges with a clean hand, then wash your palms, which otherwise glitter on everything they touch. A few drops mixed into body lotion give a softer, sheerer glow.

What flatters in photographs can look heavy in person: Stiles noted that the shimmery body makeup that suits stars on camera reads as cakey in real life, so for daylight use less.^[4] Give it a few minutes before dressing. An oil-based shimmer can come off on clothes, as she warned,^[4] and on pale upholstery. Keep it away from the eyes and from broken or irritated skin, and try a strongly scented oil on a small patch first. It washes off in the shower with ordinary soap.

A shine on the skin was once a giveaway. Powdered pearl was sold in the nineteenth century for the face and body, prized for its whiteness, and a supplement to the pharmacopoeias published in 1826 warned that cheap imitations made from mother-of-pearl or oyster shell “leave a shining appearance on the face, which shows the art that has been used”. The bismuth “pearl white” sold in powders and liquid “pearls” had its own hazard: in 1870 two writers described women whose complexions turned “a dirty ash color” when coal gas escaped into the room.^[5]

The pearl in today’s oils is younger. An essence made from fish scales, used for imitation pearls since the seventeenth century, went into nail polish in the 1920s; bismuth oxychloride with larger, more lustrous crystals was made in the laboratory from the 1930s; and the effect of coating mica with titanium dioxide, described in 1942, became widely available to cosmetics only in the 1960s.^[6] Glitter is a different and blunter thing, plastic ground into flakes, which the New Jersey machinist Henry Ruschmann learned to make in quantity in 1934; in the early 1960s Revlon, Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein brought shimmer to powders, lipsticks and eye shadows.^[7]

On the body, glitter and shimmer were a fashion of the 1990s and early 2000s. Looking back in 2025, the beauty site Byrdie recalled pop stars whose midriffs “constantly gleamed” and shimmery body gels that “flew off the shelves”;^[8] the writer Marisa Meltzer remembered wearing glitter casually at college in the 1990s, “smearing gold flecks along my clavicle”.^[9] The shimmer oil belongs to the years after. By 2015 The New York Times could call body shimmer summer’s “lovable but gorgeous ditz”, naming upscale versions and a salon pedicure that included “Tom Ford’s new shimmering body oil”;^[10] a year later Meltzer was spritzing on “a shimmering body oil called Bronze Goddess, channeling J.Lo in her prime”,^[9] and in 2025 Byrdie announced that body glitter was back.^[8] The shine that gave the art away in 1826 is now the reason for the bottle.