And on the third day, Patch did get Lush, and she saw that it was good!
Well hello to you lovely Lushies (/Miranda Hart voice)! I have some stuff to review - my obsession reached its inevitable peak over the last couple of weeks, so I bought a lot of stuff from the Christmas and Halloween ranges, as well as the FUN bars and the new haircare stuff. I haven't used everything yet, but first impressions/reviews beneath the cut.
*Blousey Shampoo: This has a spa scent to it - it's one of those products like Aqua Miribilis, Bathos or Queen Of Hearts which smell a lot more decadent and expensive than they are. I can't remember the ingredients off the top of my head (and I'm too lazy to go to the bathroom to check), but I smell lots of sandalwood in this one. It's super effective, especially if you use Retread after it - makes your hair lovely and soft and shiny :)
*Fair Trade Honey Shampoo: This one smells (surprise surprise!) of honey! There's also some rose and other florals in there too which add a nice edge to it. I'll definitely be buying more of this one when I run out, it leaves a beautiful summery scent and works really well.
*Happy Happy Joy Joy Conditioning Perfume: This has the uber-tasty orange blossom scent to it, so if you love the perfume, you need to get your mitts on a bottle of this stuff, likeritenao.
*Sea Spray: Okay, I LOVE salt sprays, because they're the best thing to add texture to my hair. I have three at the moment, and this is my favourite! The consistency is somewhere between a gel and a spray, and it has the same orange blossom fragrance as Happy Happy Joy Joy - and it gives amazing results! It does that awesome matte, textured, beachy look, and costs about half the price of the other two I use, which makes Patch a happy Patch :D
Shine So Bright: This has the same fragrance yet again, but I'm not sure it really does anything - it's a nice finishing product for dry ends, but my hair is already in good condition, so I don't really see much difference after using it. It has an interesting consistency, kind of like a mousse but thicker. If I used it every day, it wouldn't last long, so even though I like it, I probably won't buy more. R&B works better for me.
*Big Solid Conditioner: I'm undecided on Big - it's superawesomefun to use because it's all squishy and smushy, and it has the same refreshing beach scent as the shampoo, but in terms of it's effectiveness, it's kind of not all that. The first time I used it my hair was a bit dry afterwards, so the next time I tried using heaps more to see if that made a difference. It did, but Big is kind of melty as it is, so using a crap-tonne of it every time means it's not great value for money. It would probably be great for people with really short or oily hair who wouldn't need to use much, but I don't think I can justify buying more when other conditioners work so much better.
*Roots Hair Treatment: This stuff is awesome! It's right up there with H'suan Wen Hua in terms of how well it works, and it does lovely tingly minty things to one's hair, so that's always fun :D Use it followed by Blousey and Retread, and your hair will behave perfectly for days after, even if your hair is madness like mine.
*FUN: OMG these things are so cool! I know some people have been kibitzing about the price, but they're huge so they'll last forever, and they're multi-purpose and smell awesomesauce, so what's not to love? I bought one in each colour - yellow is probably the only one I won't buy again, because it smells a bit snowcake-y for my tastes, though it's less cloying. So far I've tried yellow (vanilla, snowcake and icing), pink (fairy floss, tropical blooms, and berries) and green (lime, elderflower and margaritas) as shampoo and soap, and they're all pretty damn great :D I'm planning to test the blue one (lavender, chamomile tea and cotton) as a bubble bath and soap later this week. The red one (mandarin trees, orange juice and island cocktails) is my favourite one so I'll save that one for the weekend :D Bee-Tee-Dub, if you're totally childish and simply can't help yourself, making silly shapes with them before use is all kinds of awesome, shiny fun.
*Jacko Ballistic: This is so cute! I used mine last week on a freezing cold day when I felt like I was coming down with a cold, and even though the spicy, cinnamon scent wouldn't usually be my first choice, it was super effective at warding off the impending blarg!
*Witches Ball Bubble Bar: At first I thought this was a ballistic, because it was so hard to break and crumble! There's lots of cinnamon, cloves and star anise in it, which can hurt your damn fingers when you try to use this sucker, but once you sort it out it's awesome :D I used it with Jacko, and the combination of purple and orange made the water a really cool purple-grey colour.
*North Pole Soap: I usually don't buy soap from Lush, because I get bored of the same scent after a while, and they lose their smell too quickly - I normally just get samples so I can get a little taste of it. However, when I went into my local store the other day, I picked up a chunk of the pink soap, and I couldn't take my nose away from it. This stuff smells like a freaking Aero bar, and OMG I swear I could eat the thing right now. I offered to cut a piece of it off for my mum but I'm actually glad she doesn't like it, because now I can keep the whole slice for my lucky little self! (BTW, I have a sample of the white one too, it's a nice refreshing mint, kind of woodsy and resiny, but not quite as fantabulous-chocolatey-candy-awesome as the pink).
*Bubblebeard Bubble Bar: Hee, as if there's any way I could resist a bubble bar wand in the shape of a moustache! I've taken many a silly photo with this in front of my face, and I'm excited to test it out and make a bubble beard to go with my tache. It's meant to smell like Dirty (which I'm kind of meh about), but I get a lot more lavender in this than in the Dirty range.
*Northern Lights Soap (sample): Yeah, I just had to have a piece of this for the crazy neon colours! It smells yummy, refreshing pine and citrus like an early morning walk in the forest.
*Ponche Shower Gel: OMG YUM! This is the fruitiest, juiciest product Lush have made since I Love Juicy, and it smells like something you just want to chug down on a hot day to quench an intense thirst. Orange, tangerines, tequila and a wedge of lime - all it needs is a tall salt-rimmed glass and a little umbrella! I love it when Lush do fruity, summery scents for Christmas, because as much as the spicy vanillas and candies are great for the chilly northern hemisphere, down here in Oz, Christmas is hot and muggy. Then again, oranges are great for both of those, because oranges in Christmas stockings are such an English staple. It's also great that Lush are carrying the Mexican theme through to Christmas after the usual Day Of The Dead inspired Halloween products.
*Sandy Santa: Yay! More orangey goodness :D Lush have totally kicked ass with the sugar scrub this year - remember how the Sugar Plum Fairy one from a couple of years back had those sharp, clumpy, painful chunks of sugar that scratch the living heck out of your skin? Well, they've fixed that this year! The combination of sugar and sand (love the Brazilian vibe - Lush are so international!) makes a lovely fine scrub with enough orange and sandalwood oil to leave your skin beautifully moisturised and citrus scented. The only downside? Santa doesn't hold his shape at all, so make sure you have a container to store him in. Oh, and his little red had will leave little red streaks in the shower, but they'll rinse off.
*Santa's Sack Bubble Bar: As well as smelling amazing (orange, tangerine, a hint of vanilla and tonka), this is one of the prettiest bubble bars Lush have made since Ruby Red Slippers. I'm so excited to use this one, but I want to wait until I can get my hands on a Crackersnap ballistic, because I think the orange and lemongrass would be a-freaking-mazing together!
*Let The Good Times Roll Cleanser: OMG. You guys. YOU GUYS. I need to find my passport and sort out a visa, and do you know why? So I can go and camp outside the Constantine's house and harass them night and day to make this a permanent product! I can just picture it now - after a few weeks, Mo will be like "Wow, that Patch girl is annoying," and Mark will reply "yes, she is, isn't she - I think I'm going to make more of that cleanser just to make her go away". I mean it, you guys, I'm going to make that happen. Because this stuff smells like the salted caramel I remember nomming on in Paris. Incredible texture, gentle and moisturising but exfoliating like Herbalism - but without the gritty always-gets-in-my-eyes-no-matter-how-tightly-I-close-them-or-how-well-I-rinse-it-off bits. I would never have thought of popcorn as being an effective cleansing material, but OMG. You guys. Seriously.
*Popcorn Lip Scrub: Same edible fragrance as LTGTR, except OMG you really can eat this one! Fantastic texture - scrubbier than Lip Dip, but finer than Pow Wow, with a little salty kick that makes me want to sprinkle it on top of a bowl of Madagascan Vanilla Bean and Elderflower icecream.
*Rocket Bubble Bar: I love it when Lush does fragrances that are a little bit left of centre, and with all the ginger and violet in this one, that's exactly where it lands. It's floral, herbal, woodsy and exotic - I'm going to order about a million Jingle Spells ballistics when they hit Retro next month, and I have a feeling they'll be great with this.
*Midnight Massage Bar: Okay, I'm not even exaggerating here, but I literally swooned when I unwrapped this and smelled it for the first time. Not kidding, I had to grab hold of the back of the couch or I'd have fallen over. I ordered one online, and then when I was in my local store the other day I picked up two more, because like I said to the Sales Assistant, running out of this is NOT going to be an option. This is probably my favourite product - not just my favourite Christmas product, or my favourite Lush product, but my favourite product full stop! OMG, I just have no words. No words. I mean, I was never the biggest jasmine fan before - I liked Flying Fox and Godiva, but they weren't my faves. My, how things change - I'm utterly obsessed with this bar. One hint of this takes me back to the villa in South Africa I visited two years ago, the exotic florals, sunshine and sex are all right here. If you haven't already, read Denyse Beaulieau's "The Perfume Lover" - it breaks scents down to their notes and explains a lot about why certain scents remind us of certain things. It was so interesting to find out why Jasmine can be such a powerful aphrodesiac. The exotic fruits in this make it a much more complex scent than Lush's other jasmine products, there's a delicate shimmer of gold on it, and it's shaped like a surrealist clock. It smells like faraway places, rolling around naked on sun-warmed cotton sheets, and jacaranda blossoms. It makes you feel both extravagantly languid and brimming with confidence at the same time. Excuse me for working blue here, but using this bar will make you want to wrap your legs around something. There, I said it ;)
I bought a bunch of other stuff too (Aqua Miribilis, Godiva, Karma Kream, Melting Marshmallow Moment, Floating Island, Cerridwen's Cauldron, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Catastrophe Cosmetic, Fizzbanger, Cinders, So White [which is a big bomb this year!], Father Christmas, Twilight ballistic, etc), got a couple of samples (Trichomania, Snowcake), and have some other stuff from a while back (Snow Fairy, Twilight Shower Gel, Melting Snowman, Calacas, Black Magic, Christmas Eve, Snowglobe, Magic Wand, I Love Juicy, American Cream, Angel's Delight) that I've reviewed before, so I won't bore you guys again, but if you want to know what I thought of all that stuff, check out the Lush tag on my memories page, it's all there somewhere. Oh, and I also bought the Lush Sounds CDs - love them all!
Next month there's going to be new retros, plus a whole bunch of perfumes released, so I've already got my shopping list ready to go and I'll review some more stuff then (Flower's Barrow, The Voice Of Reason, Sikkim Girls, Jasmine Revolution, Lavender Hill Mob, the Gorilla Exclusives set, Icon, Twinkle, The Enchanter, Blackberry Bomb, Party Popper, Crackersnap, Iced Wine, Jingle Spells, and maybe Ginger lotion and Mr Punch soap if I can convince them to send me samples!). Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays so far!
*Blousey Shampoo: This has a spa scent to it - it's one of those products like Aqua Miribilis, Bathos or Queen Of Hearts which smell a lot more decadent and expensive than they are. I can't remember the ingredients off the top of my head (and I'm too lazy to go to the bathroom to check), but I smell lots of sandalwood in this one. It's super effective, especially if you use Retread after it - makes your hair lovely and soft and shiny :)
*Fair Trade Honey Shampoo: This one smells (surprise surprise!) of honey! There's also some rose and other florals in there too which add a nice edge to it. I'll definitely be buying more of this one when I run out, it leaves a beautiful summery scent and works really well.
*Happy Happy Joy Joy Conditioning Perfume: This has the uber-tasty orange blossom scent to it, so if you love the perfume, you need to get your mitts on a bottle of this stuff, likeritenao.
*Sea Spray: Okay, I LOVE salt sprays, because they're the best thing to add texture to my hair. I have three at the moment, and this is my favourite! The consistency is somewhere between a gel and a spray, and it has the same orange blossom fragrance as Happy Happy Joy Joy - and it gives amazing results! It does that awesome matte, textured, beachy look, and costs about half the price of the other two I use, which makes Patch a happy Patch :D
Shine So Bright: This has the same fragrance yet again, but I'm not sure it really does anything - it's a nice finishing product for dry ends, but my hair is already in good condition, so I don't really see much difference after using it. It has an interesting consistency, kind of like a mousse but thicker. If I used it every day, it wouldn't last long, so even though I like it, I probably won't buy more. R&B works better for me.
*Big Solid Conditioner: I'm undecided on Big - it's superawesomefun to use because it's all squishy and smushy, and it has the same refreshing beach scent as the shampoo, but in terms of it's effectiveness, it's kind of not all that. The first time I used it my hair was a bit dry afterwards, so the next time I tried using heaps more to see if that made a difference. It did, but Big is kind of melty as it is, so using a crap-tonne of it every time means it's not great value for money. It would probably be great for people with really short or oily hair who wouldn't need to use much, but I don't think I can justify buying more when other conditioners work so much better.
*Roots Hair Treatment: This stuff is awesome! It's right up there with H'suan Wen Hua in terms of how well it works, and it does lovely tingly minty things to one's hair, so that's always fun :D Use it followed by Blousey and Retread, and your hair will behave perfectly for days after, even if your hair is madness like mine.
*FUN: OMG these things are so cool! I know some people have been kibitzing about the price, but they're huge so they'll last forever, and they're multi-purpose and smell awesomesauce, so what's not to love? I bought one in each colour - yellow is probably the only one I won't buy again, because it smells a bit snowcake-y for my tastes, though it's less cloying. So far I've tried yellow (vanilla, snowcake and icing), pink (fairy floss, tropical blooms, and berries) and green (lime, elderflower and margaritas) as shampoo and soap, and they're all pretty damn great :D I'm planning to test the blue one (lavender, chamomile tea and cotton) as a bubble bath and soap later this week. The red one (mandarin trees, orange juice and island cocktails) is my favourite one so I'll save that one for the weekend :D Bee-Tee-Dub, if you're totally childish and simply can't help yourself, making silly shapes with them before use is all kinds of awesome, shiny fun.
*Jacko Ballistic: This is so cute! I used mine last week on a freezing cold day when I felt like I was coming down with a cold, and even though the spicy, cinnamon scent wouldn't usually be my first choice, it was super effective at warding off the impending blarg!
*Witches Ball Bubble Bar: At first I thought this was a ballistic, because it was so hard to break and crumble! There's lots of cinnamon, cloves and star anise in it, which can hurt your damn fingers when you try to use this sucker, but once you sort it out it's awesome :D I used it with Jacko, and the combination of purple and orange made the water a really cool purple-grey colour.
*North Pole Soap: I usually don't buy soap from Lush, because I get bored of the same scent after a while, and they lose their smell too quickly - I normally just get samples so I can get a little taste of it. However, when I went into my local store the other day, I picked up a chunk of the pink soap, and I couldn't take my nose away from it. This stuff smells like a freaking Aero bar, and OMG I swear I could eat the thing right now. I offered to cut a piece of it off for my mum but I'm actually glad she doesn't like it, because now I can keep the whole slice for my lucky little self! (BTW, I have a sample of the white one too, it's a nice refreshing mint, kind of woodsy and resiny, but not quite as fantabulous-chocolatey-candy-awesome as the pink).
*Bubblebeard Bubble Bar: Hee, as if there's any way I could resist a bubble bar wand in the shape of a moustache! I've taken many a silly photo with this in front of my face, and I'm excited to test it out and make a bubble beard to go with my tache. It's meant to smell like Dirty (which I'm kind of meh about), but I get a lot more lavender in this than in the Dirty range.
*Northern Lights Soap (sample): Yeah, I just had to have a piece of this for the crazy neon colours! It smells yummy, refreshing pine and citrus like an early morning walk in the forest.
*Ponche Shower Gel: OMG YUM! This is the fruitiest, juiciest product Lush have made since I Love Juicy, and it smells like something you just want to chug down on a hot day to quench an intense thirst. Orange, tangerines, tequila and a wedge of lime - all it needs is a tall salt-rimmed glass and a little umbrella! I love it when Lush do fruity, summery scents for Christmas, because as much as the spicy vanillas and candies are great for the chilly northern hemisphere, down here in Oz, Christmas is hot and muggy. Then again, oranges are great for both of those, because oranges in Christmas stockings are such an English staple. It's also great that Lush are carrying the Mexican theme through to Christmas after the usual Day Of The Dead inspired Halloween products.
*Sandy Santa: Yay! More orangey goodness :D Lush have totally kicked ass with the sugar scrub this year - remember how the Sugar Plum Fairy one from a couple of years back had those sharp, clumpy, painful chunks of sugar that scratch the living heck out of your skin? Well, they've fixed that this year! The combination of sugar and sand (love the Brazilian vibe - Lush are so international!) makes a lovely fine scrub with enough orange and sandalwood oil to leave your skin beautifully moisturised and citrus scented. The only downside? Santa doesn't hold his shape at all, so make sure you have a container to store him in. Oh, and his little red had will leave little red streaks in the shower, but they'll rinse off.
*Santa's Sack Bubble Bar: As well as smelling amazing (orange, tangerine, a hint of vanilla and tonka), this is one of the prettiest bubble bars Lush have made since Ruby Red Slippers. I'm so excited to use this one, but I want to wait until I can get my hands on a Crackersnap ballistic, because I think the orange and lemongrass would be a-freaking-mazing together!
*Let The Good Times Roll Cleanser: OMG. You guys. YOU GUYS. I need to find my passport and sort out a visa, and do you know why? So I can go and camp outside the Constantine's house and harass them night and day to make this a permanent product! I can just picture it now - after a few weeks, Mo will be like "Wow, that Patch girl is annoying," and Mark will reply "yes, she is, isn't she - I think I'm going to make more of that cleanser just to make her go away". I mean it, you guys, I'm going to make that happen. Because this stuff smells like the salted caramel I remember nomming on in Paris. Incredible texture, gentle and moisturising but exfoliating like Herbalism - but without the gritty always-gets-in-my-eyes-no-matter-how-tightly-I-close-them-or-how-well-I-rinse-it-off bits. I would never have thought of popcorn as being an effective cleansing material, but OMG. You guys. Seriously.
*Popcorn Lip Scrub: Same edible fragrance as LTGTR, except OMG you really can eat this one! Fantastic texture - scrubbier than Lip Dip, but finer than Pow Wow, with a little salty kick that makes me want to sprinkle it on top of a bowl of Madagascan Vanilla Bean and Elderflower icecream.
*Rocket Bubble Bar: I love it when Lush does fragrances that are a little bit left of centre, and with all the ginger and violet in this one, that's exactly where it lands. It's floral, herbal, woodsy and exotic - I'm going to order about a million Jingle Spells ballistics when they hit Retro next month, and I have a feeling they'll be great with this.
*Midnight Massage Bar: Okay, I'm not even exaggerating here, but I literally swooned when I unwrapped this and smelled it for the first time. Not kidding, I had to grab hold of the back of the couch or I'd have fallen over. I ordered one online, and then when I was in my local store the other day I picked up two more, because like I said to the Sales Assistant, running out of this is NOT going to be an option. This is probably my favourite product - not just my favourite Christmas product, or my favourite Lush product, but my favourite product full stop! OMG, I just have no words. No words. I mean, I was never the biggest jasmine fan before - I liked Flying Fox and Godiva, but they weren't my faves. My, how things change - I'm utterly obsessed with this bar. One hint of this takes me back to the villa in South Africa I visited two years ago, the exotic florals, sunshine and sex are all right here. If you haven't already, read Denyse Beaulieau's "The Perfume Lover" - it breaks scents down to their notes and explains a lot about why certain scents remind us of certain things. It was so interesting to find out why Jasmine can be such a powerful aphrodesiac. The exotic fruits in this make it a much more complex scent than Lush's other jasmine products, there's a delicate shimmer of gold on it, and it's shaped like a surrealist clock. It smells like faraway places, rolling around naked on sun-warmed cotton sheets, and jacaranda blossoms. It makes you feel both extravagantly languid and brimming with confidence at the same time. Excuse me for working blue here, but using this bar will make you want to wrap your legs around something. There, I said it ;)
I bought a bunch of other stuff too (Aqua Miribilis, Godiva, Karma Kream, Melting Marshmallow Moment, Floating Island, Cerridwen's Cauldron, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Catastrophe Cosmetic, Fizzbanger, Cinders, So White [which is a big bomb this year!], Father Christmas, Twilight ballistic, etc), got a couple of samples (Trichomania, Snowcake), and have some other stuff from a while back (Snow Fairy, Twilight Shower Gel, Melting Snowman, Calacas, Black Magic, Christmas Eve, Snowglobe, Magic Wand, I Love Juicy, American Cream, Angel's Delight) that I've reviewed before, so I won't bore you guys again, but if you want to know what I thought of all that stuff, check out the Lush tag on my memories page, it's all there somewhere. Oh, and I also bought the Lush Sounds CDs - love them all!
Next month there's going to be new retros, plus a whole bunch of perfumes released, so I've already got my shopping list ready to go and I'll review some more stuff then (Flower's Barrow, The Voice Of Reason, Sikkim Girls, Jasmine Revolution, Lavender Hill Mob, the Gorilla Exclusives set, Icon, Twinkle, The Enchanter, Blackberry Bomb, Party Popper, Crackersnap, Iced Wine, Jingle Spells, and maybe Ginger lotion and Mr Punch soap if I can convince them to send me samples!). Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays so far!