Last year I went off to a beautiful spa day in the New Forest for my birthday (and by spa day, I mean that I went in the pools and the showers and the hot rooms; I didn’t have any treatments) and I enjoyed it so much I decided it should be an annual event. Not necessarily on my birthday but at some point throughout the year.
And then the plague came along.
I’d not really thought about it. Spa days aren’t high on my priority list and that I hadn’t been able to do the annual spa day that I’d barely got round to instituting in the first place wasn’t something that had really crossed my mind. But then I watched an unboxing video on YouTube, someone who’d ordered or possibly been sent for PR purposes, a Lush Kitchen subscription box. I don’t watch a lot of them. I watch one unboxer and she doesn’t generally do bath products. It looked nice. It contained a saffron & vanilla custardy body lotion, a heart-shaped rose-scented bath bomb with flowers all over it, a citrus & honey shower gel, a rosemary & coconut solid soap and a lime shower smoothie. I have no intention of subscribing – £35 + shipping every month for a box of surprise products isn’t my thing – but I thought “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose what came in your box?”
Yes. It’s called “ordering some stuff from Lush”.
So I did. The subscription box contained five items and I ordered five items and it came to £37.90 + shipping, so roughly equivalent to the box. Obviously, I won’t be doing this every month. I’m not inventing my own personalised subscription box. In fact, since a brief soap mania mostly fuelled by someone else when I was a student, I’ve only bought from Lush twice in my adult life. I bought a bath bomb to relax after a terrifying day of being in a minibus with eight Brownies, three of which get travelsick, and I bought two bath bombs at the beginning of All This, to use at the beginning and end of lockdown.
Lush, by the way, is a local business to me. I used to work about 100 yards from the 29 High Street store. Many’s the time in my childhood that I walked down that road and an older relative pointed out 29 ½ High Street and that halves in house numbers are unusual. This was before Lush’s days, by the way. There’s a model shop next door and my dad used to stand outside staring at model trains and buses for hours. I wish I could remember what the building used to be. As a teenager, my friends all worked in Tesco. My sister’s friends, just a few years later, worked in Lush and she looked for their names on the stickers on the sides of the pots.
Once my box arrived, it dawned on me that I could use this all to have that spa day. It would be at home in my own bath, there would be no warm pools or experience showers or tepidaria but still. To be frank, the box smells… well, it smells pretty minty, actually, but in the 24 hours since I opened it, it’s filled the house with the unmistakeable smell of Lush. It’s an interesting box – the sides fold inwards instead of traditional flaps on each side – and it’s divided into four sections and filled with pellets. They look like the polystyrene packing pellets but they’re made of some kind of vegetable starch and dissolve in water.
I bought a face mask – one I remember my sister having from those teenage years, Mask of Magnaminty, which is very minty clay face mask. I got Volcano because… well, the name. It’s a clay foot mask and it doesn’t smell so good. It also has little globules of tomato in, which is offputting because I hate tomato goo. I got the Marshmallow World bath bomb, which is supposed to smell of American cream and strawberries and all things sweet and sugary. I’m finally trying one of their conditioner bars, Golden Cap, which is presumably named after the big sandstone cliff further along the Dorset coast, and I finished off with the on-brand Polar Bear Plunge bubble bar, which makes bubbles when you hold it under the tap and which is the primary cause of the strong minty smell. I’m not big on “it smells good enough to eat!” but it’s a very edible sort of mint smell.
So the bath bomb was great. It turned the bath candy floss pink with white patterns which turned just plain candy floss pink when I got in and all the patterns got mixed. I don’t tend to find bombs make either the water or the room smell of much but it’s pretty. It makes good pictures but it’s something that I’m not very bothered about.
I put my tablet aside, took off my glasses and I put on the face mask. Had I forgotten how very minty it smells or did I remember exactly how strong it is? Because it’s strong. It’s so minty and I do enjoy how the clay dries and I can feel it cracking if I move my face. Washing it off is pretty easy but on the other hand, the pipes don’t enjoy an influx of clay – the bath now drains so slowly that sometimes I have to clear the plughole a bit and I’m now going to have to Google how to clear clay out of pipes.
The foot mask is… well, I have feelings about it. The primary feeling is that someone should start a campaign to have it renamed Glacier instead of Volcano because it’s cold. It’s grey and doesn’t smell as minty as it feels. I couldn’t figure out how and when to use it – if I do in my room or even my office, I’ve then got to get to the bathroom with clay-covered feet to wash it off. So I applied it in the bath and hung my feet over the side. That’s not comfortable and that menthol makes my feet cold. I have the window open so the damp doesn’t make the bathroom mouldy and that makes my menthol-covered feet really cold. You need to rub well to get the remnants of grey clay off and putting them back in the warm water stings.
In my next bath, I tried out the bubble bar. Now, the first and biggest problem is that you have to hold it under the tap. It’s ok with a mixer tap but surely otherwise you have to decide whether to endure serious scalding or getting your fingers frozen, and also crouching next to the bath for ten minutes holding this thing under the water is the opposite of a luxury home spa experience. Smells amazing, though, really minty – even mintier than the face mask – and makes lots of bubbles. I got five baths out of that bear, although it ceased to be recognisable as a polar bear pretty quickly.
The conditioner bar was a puzzle. The instructions said to lather in my hands and apply that to my hair. That turned out to be absolutely nothing. So I scrubbed it directly into my hair. Actually, that worked a bit better. I still couldn’t feel anything but I could see a certain amount of faintly yellow liquid coating my hair and it felt surprisingly soft in the morning, so it must be working. But it’s very different from the kind of gooey conditioner in bottles that I’m used to.
And then, after saying I wouldn’t be doing this regularly, I missed my interesting baths and ordered some more stuff. Three bubble bars, because they’re more efficient and practical than bath bombs, and a shampoo bar. And two tins to store the shampoo & conditioner bars. Turns out the conditioner bar is oval and won’t fit in the tin and I’ve heard
The Abracadabra bar, magic wand-shaped, is kind of blackcurranty but also citrusy and turns the water a weird shade of greyish-blue. I think if it was less diluted it might look more purple. I found a better way of bubbling, too. A wire shower rack that just fits over the tap. I can pop the bar in it and let it do its thing. I reckon I can get three to four baths out of this bar – after one use, it seems barely changed from when it was fresh, except it’s lost some of the sparkle on the white ends.
Brightside is a big round orange tie-dye galaxy-patterned orange-scented bar that turned the water orange. Definitely a theme to this one. I thought it would last ages but the tap managed to carve a huge cavern in one side on its first use. I was hoping it would last at least eight baths but I’m thinking that might be a bit optimistic.
The third bubble bar was another Polar Bear Plunge but you already know what that’s like. Minty, bubbly, lasts four or five baths.
Finally, I tried out the shampoo bar. Now, this was more what I expected. It lathered quickly, easily and thickly, and within about ten seconds I had enough shampoo in my hands to wash my hair in a way that felt like I was used to. Honey I Washed My Hair contains honey and orange oil and is supposed to leave your hair smelling a bit like caramel. I can’t say I noticed that. My hair felt clean – possibly too clean. A bit squeaky and drier than I like but I followed it with the Golden Cap conditioner bar and my hair feels ok this morning.
And that was my home spa! It’s not quite as good as a day in a hydrotherapy pool and laconium and crystal steam room but it’s a lot better than an ordinary bath or a boring shower.