Can you use body lotion on your face?

This morning I was putting The White Company’s Flowers Hand & Nail cream – by the way this cream is heavily frangranced with a bit of posh note – on my hands and wondering what is the real difference between hand cream and facial cream. Instinctively I don’t use hand cream on my face and I think I shouldn’t but I wanted to know so that I can explain when I’m asked. I searched some info on the internet and found this.

This explicates the difference very clearly and states why you shouldn’t use body lotion (or hand lotion) on our face. I copied the original article and pasted as below.

Why would anyone want to use their hand lotion or body moisturizer on their face you may ask. Well, out of convenience is my guess. Like my husband, who used the Sukin Hydrating Body Lotion I passed him and applied it all over, including his face! And the result? Clogged pores and a mini eruption of pimples. In fact, he didn’t even realized the reason until I questioned him.

Body lotions are richer than face moisturizers
I had to explain to him that there is a big difference between facial and body moisturizers even if their texture seem similar. First, the skin condition between our face and our body is different with the skin on our hands and body typically drier than our face. Hence, the body lotion only needs to hydrate the dry skin and are thus formulated to be richer. I haven’t seen any body lotion that states that it is “non-comedogenic” although you see a lot of this on creams and moisturizers for the face, which means it won’t clog your pores.

Some ingredients can clog pores
Even if the ingredients used are the same, the concentration could be different. For example, if you compare the ingredients of Sukin Hydrating Body Lotion and Sukin Facial Moisturizer, they look almost similar but some of their order are different. The concentration of shea butter and cocoa butter are higher for the body lotion since they’re listed first. And cocoa butter has been widely rated as having a fairly high propensity to clog pores.

Sukin Hydrating Body Lotion Ingredients: purified water, an organic blend of aloe vera, nettle, burdock and horsetail, sesame oil, cetyl alcohol (vegetable), ceteareth-20 (vegetable), glycerin (vegetable), shea butter, cocoa butter, jojoba oil, rosehip oil, avocado oil, wheat germ oil, vitamin E, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate (suttocide), grapeseed extract, tangerine essential oil, mandarin oil, lavender oil, vanilla extract.

Sukin Facial Moisturiser Ingredients: purified water, an organic blend of aloe vera, nettle, burdock and horsetail, sesame oil, palm kernel alcohol (vegetable), ceteareth-20 (vegetable), glycerin (vegetable), vitamin E, avocado oil, jojoba oil, cocoa butter, rosehip oil, shea butter, wheat germ oil, tangerine essential oil, mandarin oil, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate (suttocide), citric acid, grapefruit seed extract, lavender, vanilla extract.

So you can apply your facial moisturizer on your body but you should never apply your body lotion on your face. At least that’s a lesson my husband learnt the hard way.