Serena Ava Franco has quickly cultivated a reputation as one of the best perfume e-tailers out there with her line Ava Luxe, which features a wide range of creative, thoughtful, elegant and affordable scents. Along with perfumes, she offers a selection of bath and body products that can be ordered unscented or to match any fragrance in her line. I recently sampled her Ultra Rich Body Lotion in two of my favorite Ava Luxe scents, Sweet Almond and Red Carnation, and found that the quality of her body line is just as high as that of her fragrances.

The quality of the lotion itself is amazing — shea butter, Vitamin E, sage, honey and yarrow provide excellent moisture — and it carries the fragrance very well for up to five or six hours. Sweet Almond has a luscious doughy, sugary scent, with a hint of cherry-almond or amaretto sweetness in the background, perfect for layering with almond fragrances like L’Artisan Jour de Fete and Etro Heliotrope (in fact, this is far better than Etro’s own matching lotion, which I personally feel bears an unfortunate resemblance to wet dog food on my skin), and of course, the original Ava Luxe Sweet Almond perfume…

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