These Bath and Shower Products Can Help You Get a Good Night’s Sleep

Typically, bubble bath makes me giddy. But this is more like the froth on a decaf cappuccino. Its scent—a warm, rich blend of lavender, bergamot, and tonka bean—was created to optimize sleep quality, using fragrance house Givaudan’s DreamScentz technology. I go through bottles of this milk faster than the milk in my fridge.

If it’s all about the bubbles for you, go with this. The lavender scent is quite light, but you’ll find yourself chilling in a sea of suds.

I’ve always considered bath salts to be a utilitarian purchase: Achy muscles? Toss some Epsom salt into the tub. This proved that salt can be downright dreamy. The gentle clinking of the thick glass cap; the scent of sea air mixed with cashmere wood and heady labdanum (not to be confused with laudanum, the opiate, labdanum is the main ingredient of amber fragrance); the dried botanicals floating in the tub...it’s a gorgeous experience. Do I want it to be someone else’s turn to clean the tub and pick up all the botanical bits left behind? You bet. But these salts are worth their, you know, even if I am on tub-scrubbing duty.

Sweet dreams are made of this. It has a jasmine and white tea scent and the lightest-weight oil that lingers on my skin after showering. When I slip into my sheets, I feel like I’m staying at le plus chic Paris hotel.

This body wash is scented only by its cucumber and aloe extracts, which, along with the formula’s oat kernel flours, mellow both irritated skin and moods.

Unless you like sitting on grit, a scrub used in the tub needs to dissolve quickly: Sugar-based body scrubs get the job done gently and then disappear. This one combines white and brown sugars plus sunflower oil, jasmine, and tiare flower for a gloriously drippy, utterly indulgent scrub that melts into a milk as you smooth it across your skin.

I equate this exfoliating experience to sipping your favorite herbal tea, with sugar, in the tub.

Is it me, or do too many bath bombs have more promise than payoff? They start with a fabulous fizz and then literally fizzle out, leaving behind water that’s a pretty color...and that’s about it. This one, however, is dynamite. It has skin-soothing cocoa butter and colloidal oatmeal, plus oat, milk, and honey extracts. The yummy scent emanating from the hot water reminded me of hot cocoa, and my skin felt delicious.

For the uninitiated (I was!), a shower steamer is meant to release aromatherapeutic vapors when the shower water splashes onto it. This comes with four scented tablets and a hand-carved marble dish so they don’t goop up your shower floor. I’m partial to the Eucalyptus Lavender scent, which makes my shower smell like the steam room at a high-end spa.

After spending way too much time pulling granules out of my hair, I swore off scalp scrubs. But since I still want the circulatory benefits, I reach for these pointy (but not sharp) plastic nubs. They get right to the root as I shampoo, lifting away any scalp grossness while treating me to a relaxing scalp massage I’d tip at least five dollars for at the salon.

Before we oil up, a little clarity on this murky topic: Bath oils and shower oils are the same thing. When mixed with water, they become milky and disperse nicely into the water and/or onto your skin. They can also be used directly on wet skin once the water is off, like a moisturizer. Body oils, on the other hand, remain in their slick state and are best used after the bath only; I found that adding body oil to the bath (even if the label suggests it) means there will be some random blobs of oil floating around the tub (and a very slick surface when you get out). So this is the shower oil I love to pour into my bath. It uses palm oil from the Amazonian rainforest. It smells wonderfully warm and woodsy and leaves my skin hella soft.

In college, a friend of mine taught me to apply baby oil to my skin straight out of the shower to “lock in” all the good moisture. I’ll always have a fondness for old-school Johnson’s, but I’ve since graduated to more natural oils. Making the grade: By Rosie Jane Calm The F*ck Down Everyday Body Oil, with coconut, olive, and rose hip seed oils plus stress-reducing lavender, neroli, and chamomile. Sure could’ve used this during exam weeks.

I debated whether or not to include a body lotion here. Technically, I apply lotion when I’m already out of the bath or shower, but it’s such an influential part of my nighttime routine that I had to share. This lotion's lavender and hemp seed aroma trigged a scent memory for me that brought me so much joy. It reminded me of sleeping “in the crack”—between my grandparents in the space where their twin beds met—at their summer cottage. I put it on and felt an enormous wave of comfort. I guess that’s what any good bedtime product should do. Go find the scent that speaks to you.