LUSH FRESH HANDMADE COSMETICS

Related Articles

LUCIA MERLO: REDEFINING LUXURY IN THE FASHION WORLD

November 4, 2024

SCULPTED ELEGANCE & TIMELESS CREATIONS BY DAPHNE VALENTE

October 24, 2024

‘Lush – injecting fun into beauty with innovative products made from natural ingredients’.
The London Guide, 2006

Self-appointed cosmetics grocer Lush is the ultimate beauty delicatessen.  Think handmade, natural and fresh merchandise; butchers’ blocks of soap; a myriad of orbs (fizzing bath ballistics) that are presented in-store like perfectly round apples; chilled fish counter-style cabinets displaying our unique Bio Fresh face masks; prices by weight, greaseproof paper wrapping (if any wrapping at all) and best-before dates.

“I’ve always loved the way fruit and vegetables are displayed in a grocery store,” says Mark Constantine, Lush’s Managing Director, who set up the company in 1995, in Poole, Dorset, with a close-knit team with whom he has worked for some 20 years.   The Lush head office continues to be based in Poole and there are currently over 100 shops in the UK.

Lush currently has 856 shops worldwide and are present in 51 countries, with manufacturing sites across the world.

INVENTION

The Lush inventors love to challenge convention.  We invent and create new products faster than any other cosmetics brand and while we’re at it, we like to have a bit of fun.  We like to innovate in everything we do: from cosmetics to recruitment to ethics and campaigns.  We believe innovation is going beyond someone’s imagination and seeing if you just can’t surprise.

Lush Bath Ballistics are one of our earliest inventions – Mo Constantine OBE (Lush Co-Founder) invented the original Bath Bomb in 1989 and ever since we haven’t stopped our exploration into the world of bath time innovation.  Now we’ve taken things even further and into the wilds of space, colours and even more scents.

We own the patent on many of our inventions, ranging from Shampoo Bars to Toothy Tabs, so you can experience our products just as we imagined them.

FRESH, EXTREMELY FRESH

Freshness is intrinsic to Lush – it’s at the heart of our philosophy.  It means we can minimize the use of synthetics and it means that we can create wonderfully effective products when the ingredients are at their most potent.  When Lush products reach the customer, they are literally weeks, days or even just hours old.   No product in any of our shops is more than 6 months old.

We’ve been working with fresh produce for many years and have vast experience on how to formulate products that incorporate whole fruits and vegetables.  At Lush, we believe that using the whole fruit or vegetable is infinitely more beneficial than isolating a property and removing it from a fruit, vegetable or natural material and adding it to a cosmetic product to try to recreate its function.

Of the 233 or so products manufactured by Lush, around 154 are unpreserved.  Those that do contain preservatives are liquid products containing water, such as moisturizers and lotions, and require some preservatives to give them some shelf life.  Lush uses minimal levels of 2 preservatives in its products (as opposed to 5 or 6 like some of our competitors), the safest and mildest we know – namely methyl and propyl paraben.

SOLID PRINCIPLE

Lush have spent years – nay decades – developing solid products that work really effectively.  Why?  Because solid products don’t need preservatives or excess packaging, look towards http://www.westpenn.com/liquid-packaging/ for the kind of packaging we are talking about. Lush’s minimal approach is altogether kinder for the environment.  Simple really.

Each year we sell millions of ‘naked’ products – thereby reducing the amount of packaging sent to landfill had our customers bought a similar product from a different retailer.

38% of our current product range is ‘naked’.  In 2009, in the UK alone, we sold over 5.9 million naked items.  200,000 of these items were shampoo bars, meaning that 15 tonnes of plastic was avoided.

RECYCLING & WASTE PRINCIPLE

We believe that the best way to tackle recycling is to not create the waste in the first place.  Lush try to remove it at the design stage, then if there is any waste we will aim to reuse it.  If we can’t reuse it anywhere, then it will be recycled.

We have been able to do this by considering the need for packaging at the design stage. Lush probably uses less than half the packaging materials a comparable cosmetic company would use just by selling products without packaging.

Our bags and catalogue, The Lush Times, are printed on recycled paper containing no chlorine.

INGREDIENTS

An example of how many fresh ingredients Lush squeeze in every year include: 25 tonnes of organic fruit and 50 tonnes of fresh fruit and vegetables a year, both organic and conventional, locally sourced (weather permitting!); we use the oil from 20 million Sicilian lemons, 6 million fresh Sicilian bergamot fruits and 900,000 Sicilian mandarins; 10 tonnes of Fairtrade and organic cocoa butter from The Dominican Republic and Costa Rica; the juice of 90,000 zest lemons 33,000 fresh oranges; 8,000 bunches of fresh flowers; and 20 tonnes of olive oil (a combination of the finest first press extra virgin olive oil we can buy, organic and fair trade), that’s the oil from over 30 million olives.

60% of everything Lush make will have at least one organic ingredient in.

It is important to us to source and buy the very best ingredients we can find, as we want you to enjoy using them as much as we enjoy making them.  We like to spend more money on the quality of ingredients than anything else, so spend less on things like packaging.  Which is why we can afford to offer our customers high quality products for reasonable prices.

HANDMADE

We prefer people to make our products in big kitchens, as opposed to faceless industrial machines.  This philosophy also works out to be much more energy efficient – it’s better for the environment to fuel people with food than it is to power big industrial machines with electricity.

We like to produce cosmetics with a human personalised touch, whilst creating local jobs with HappyAnt and using local resources.  It gives us our unique edge and enables us to keep an eye on quality.  You should be able to spot a fake a mile off!

To reinforce the message, we’ll even add stickers to all products telling you who made it – along with when each product is made and when it goes out of date.

STILL FIGHTING ANIMAL TESTING

Here at Lush we believe that our products should be effective, fun and safe for you to use.  We believe that the most effective and humane way to safety test both the ingredients we use and our finished products are through modern non-animal tests and a panel of human volunteers.

Lush are firmly committed to a policy which not only precludes testing its products and ingredients on animals, or engaging with third-party suppliers to do so on their behalf, but we will also not buy any ingredient from any supplier that tests any of its materials on any animals for any purpose. This policy is unique in its field and is pioneering a new way to stop animal tests for cosmetics.

In 2006 Lush ran a campaign in all their EU stores, urging customers to sign postcards to MEPs asking for animals to be kept out of REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals).   Over 68,000 cards were signed. Being against animal testing was a founding principle and will continue to be an intrinsic value of Lush.

In 2012 Lush spearheaded a campaign across the UK and European Union – where animal testing of cosmetics is already banned – to ban the sale of cosmetics tested on animals abroad. A sales ban is due to be implemented in March 2013, but EU policy makers are considering delaying or weakening it, so we urged consumers to sign HSI’s CrueltyFree2013 petition in Lush stores and online.

Outside the EU, animal testing for cosmetics continues and is even a legal requirement in some countries.  HSI offices in Australia, Canada, India and the United States are joining with Lush to end cosmetics cruelty with nationwide consumer campaigns in each region. HSI will also be working with politicians, regulators and scientists to press for change.

Hilary Jones, Ethics Director at Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, comments: “The animals have waited over 20 years for this legislation to be fully enacted. Whilst the laws were not strong enough, companies like Lush have adopted voluntary codes of practice to cut animal testing from their business.  But animals should not have to rely on voluntary codes of conduct, they should be protected by robust laws which force ALL companies to adopt humane methods to bring their products to market.  The public demanded this legislation in the 80s and 90s – it is time to honour the promise given to them to take animals out of cosmetics testing.”

Lush encourage and support the development and validation of non-animal testing methodologies and will actively campaign for their use instead of outmoded and cruel animal experiments.  In June 2012 we also launched the first ever Lush Prize to help bring an end to animal testing in the wake of the continuing failure to ban these practices.

The Lush Prize is a £250,000 global annual prize – the biggest prize in the alternative testing sector – and will reward groups or individuals working in the field of cruelty-free scientific research, awareness-raising and lobbying.  The idea is to incentivise people into achieving actual change.  The prize has been created by Lush in partnership with Ethical Consumer ensuring that the award process is impartial, rigorous and comprehensive in scope.  The first Lush Prize Awards will take place in November 2012.

CHARITABLE GIVING

At Lush we try to approach our charity support a little differently. We’re not perfect and there’s a lot more we can do, which is something we’re working on all the time, but in summary the main ways we feel our charity support is different to other companies includes:-

1. We are a campaigning company and use our shop windows to raise awareness of issues and actively engage staff and customers;
2. We choose campaign issues that other companies and funders are too afraid to tackle;
3. We give 100% (less VAT) of the proceeds of our permanent charity product, Charity Pot, and limited edition charity products, to charity and other good causes;
4. We support small grassroots groups and causes that are harder to raise funds for; not large popular charities that can offer us good PR;
5. The ethics of the company comes from the top and are core to the business. We have a team of people working for Lush from charity/ activist backgrounds who help the company be as ethical as possible. These include charitable giving manager, ethical communications manager, environment officer and campaigns manager.

CAMPAIGNS

Throughout the year Lush partners with organizations to run nationwide campaigns in our shops.  Our campaigns team, along with the help of our creative design team and enthusiastic shop staff, have run a variety of campaigns over the last few years.  We run campaigns on issues ranging from those which are a core part of our business, such as: animal testing, palm oil, vegetarianism and packaging; to those which are unrelated to the business but are causes we feel strongly about, such as:  fox hunting, shark finning, an end to torture and the right to a fair trial, climate change and destitute refugees.

We like to be able to use our shop fronts to grab people’s attention and lure them in to find out more about an issue.  There is often substantial media coverage for the issue and the organization we are supporting.  Since we often run campaigns on those subjects that most would find too controversial to take on, we are often criticized by the media and public, but we always stand by our causes.

LUSH – IN BRIEF

• 100% not tested on animals.
• 100% suitable for vegetarians and approved by the Vegetarian Society.
• 83% of Lush products are suitable for vegans and approved by the Vegan Society.
• 100% fresh, handmade products.  Made with organic produce where possible.
• 60% of products are unpreserved.
• 38% of our current product range is unpackaged (Oct 2012 figure).

ACCOLADES

• 2006 – Winner of the RSPCA Good Business Award, for animal welfare ethics.
• 2006 – Winner of a PETA Trailblazer Award for work in animal welfare.
• 2007 – Winner of the RSPCA Good Business Award – Outstanding commitment for achieving higher standards for animal welfare.
• 2008 – Winner of a Green Award for the solid shampoo bars in the ‘Best Packaging’ category.
• 2009 – Winner of the RSPCA Good Business Award – Cosmetic category – large company.
• 2009 – Winner of a Vegetarian Society Award for Best Personal Care Product – Happy Hippy shower gel.
• Featured in the top 100 Companies to Work For list, as featured by The Sunday Times, for 8 years.
• 2010 – Awarded Business of the Year from The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
• 2010 – Mark & Mo Constantine awarded OBE’s in the Queen’s New Year Honours list for services to the beauty industry.
• 2011 – WHICH? magazine members rated LUSH top for customer service in their annual ‘Best & Worst Shops’ survey.  Rated 2^nd best shop in the Cosmetics category.