A Lush Life

•  Can you imagine being beaten and raped by your own partner?
•  Can you imagine the authorities not caring about crimes committed against you?
•  Can you imagine fearing for your children’s lives everyday?

Some people don’t have to imagine.

Who is Mrs S?

Mrs S is an Egyptian woman, who fled Egypt and her dangerous husband in hope of finding a peaceful life in the UK. She has two children who are young enough to be attached to her case, so whatever happens to her, will also happen to them.

Mrs S’s husband beat and raped her, repeatedly, over 15 years, and was never convicted with any crime. He has also committed crimes against other families, who could ‘avenge’ him by targeting his innocent wife and children. He gets away with all this because he has strong links to the police force and the judicial authorities, so even when police reports have been filed, he remains free.

Mrs S tried to protect her children from her husband’s beatings, but she fled when she thought there was no other option to keep them safe. As is the cultural custom in their community, her daughters are also required to undergo female genital mutilation before marriage. Mrs S has kept them from this as long as she could, but is certain that they will be forced to undergo it if they return, like she was forced to before her own marriage. Female genital mutilation is a horrific practice, where a woman’s genitals are cut, or circumcised, to keep them ‘pure’ for a future husband. They bleed for months. It is a completely unnecessary, torturous and potentially deadly practice. Mrs S wants to protect her family from the beatings, from rape and from mutilation. She wants to protect them from fearing their everyday lives.

Why is she anonymous?

The lengthy process of applying for asylum has been very detrimental to Mrs S’s health. She is experiencing depression and severe anxiety at the prospect of being deported. So, we at Lush and NCADC are fighting for her, as she has so little strength left to. We are in constant touch with her, but we ask for her to remain out the of the public eye.

Why was the case rejected?

In escaping Egypt, Mrs S was forced to temporarily leave behind her daughter, who managed to make her way to the UK later on. In her claim for asylum, someone advised her to lie and say she was from Iraq instead, which she did out of fear for her daughter’s safety. She worried that if she admitted she was Egyptian, that this would get back to the country’s authorities that her daughter was in the process of fleeing too. 

Although Mrs S only lied to protect her daughter, this lie has tainted the whole case, and we ask the Home Office to take into consideration her fears of her daughter’s safety. Other reasons given for rejection of asylum, is that her photocopies of judicial documents were not ‘official’ enough. 

What happens next? 

Now that Mrs S has failed her third, and final, appeal for asylum, she will undergo the Home Office’s forced removal. If she’s not on a plane on a particular date that they specify, they will break into her house in the middle of the night - so she can’t get in contact with anyone to help - and will forcibly drag her and her children from their beds. Unless, we can do something to stop it.

What can I do to help?

Firstly, you can simply sign one of our lobbying postcards, available in the Lush shops in Wales (Cardiff and Swansea). We can then send them off to the Home Secretary. Secondly, it would be amazing if you could simply tell other people about this. Talk about this with others. Ask your friends and family to sign the postcards, and share the link to our website. You can also sign up to the mailing list, which we’ll use to simply tell you what happens next to this family. 

Thank you so much for wanting to help. They need all the help they can get.

In her own words

“When I first arrived here, I felt human again. My children and I deserve to live freely, with no fears. But now, after they have been trying to remove me forcibly, I remember life in Egypt and how we would be treated as slaves and the danger that would always be waiting for us. I had several nervous breakdowns, not being able to eat or sleep. I would look at my children and my eyes would be immediately full of tears because I felt that I couldn’t protect them any more. I’m afraid I’ll lose them if we are forced back to Egypt. A person at the Home Office told me that they told me that they would give me money if I go back but they don’t understand! Even a million pounds would not be equal to losing one of your children, and having money does nothing to protect us.

I was very rich in Egypt, my children went to private schools and we had nice cars and owned nice houses. It’s not about money, it’s my children’s lives. When I was explaining to the person at the Home Office that I can’t go back and if they force me I would kill my self for my children to stay he said that even if I do kill my self they would send my children back… Are they not human? How could human feelings allow someone to even say something like that, let alone actually do it. Even though I brought them legal evidence, shown them marks of torture on my body and collected dozens of support letters from my community, they still wouldn’t let us stay.I could not prove that my broken bones and scarred body was ‘tortured’. I just want my children to feel human again and live without having to hide or fear anyone, is this too much to ask?”

In the shop this last week, we’ve been running the ‘No One Is Illegal’ campaign, battling the disinformation that many newspapers try to propagate about immigration. This is the video of our own Andrew trying to get across the EU border with one of our Lush ‘World Citizen Passports’!

Here at Lush Swansea, we admit that we were slightly reluctant to put too much online about this campaign, because there was such a strong, mostly negative and angry response to it on the main Lush page. However we’ve been telling everyone about it in the store and had an overwhelmingly positive response when we talk about it face to face. Whilst we’re more than happy to talk to someone who disagrees with our campaign, we didn’t want people to become angry at us because we were simply engaging in political protest.

The point of this campaign is that all people from the world over should have the same rights as anyone else. Being born in a different country should never make you an ‘illegal citizen’. No one is illegal.

We’re told that people from foreign countries steal ‘our’ jobs, take ‘our’ benefits and are wasting ‘our’ government services. For a start, we don’t believe that simply because we’re lucky enough to be British citizens that we’re any more entitled or deserving of a job, benefit services or universal healthcare. If someone who wasn’t born here is better for a job than someone who was, then we believe they should get it.

We don’t believe that asylum seekers coming from dangerous, unstable or war-torn countries should be turned away. They already only have 70% of the usual benefits allowance, and they would usually rather work, but are prohibited to until and if they are allowed to stay (and they’re usually told they can’t).

In purely economic, if not humanitarian terms: Non-British citizens contribute to ￡5.5 billion to our economy. Taking into account the government services they use, ￡2.2 billion of that is pure profit to the economy. Without them, Britain would be a lot worse off. So why are we still insisting that people be ‘illegal’?

In store, we’re working with the No One Is Illegal organisation and giving out newspapers on the issue, as well as our own ‘world passports’! These are the same as the ones Andrew used while trying to get to France, so you can either try use them yourself, or just get them stamped everytime you go to any Lush store! (Here at Swansea, you might even get ‘frequent flyer’ rewards…)

Thank you all for your support in this campaign, and spread the word! No one is illegal!

As well as all our beautiful essential oils, we also use a few slightly less glamorous ingredients in our products. Along with sodium bicarbonate and cream of tartar - both of which are crucial to our unique bubble bar recipe - we also use 350 tonnes of citric acid every year. It comes from citrus fruits and you can find it in all kinds of food, but we use it in our ballistics to give them that special effervescence. Our citric acid comes from sugar beet - the factory which supplies it is surrounded by fields of sugar beet, which is made into a kind of mulch to which a special kind of fungus is added. This fungus actually digests the sugar beet, thereby producing crystals which are then tumbled, dried and ground to give us the powder we need.

As with all our ingredients, it’s crucial that we get good quality - but with citric acid it’s also really important that the grain size of the powder is correct. If the size if just a little bit off, the ballistics won’t fizz properly, and it can also cause other problems.

There are lots of ways in which Lush as a company differs from many others, but one key way is how our products are priced. Many companies set their prices according to their target market, but Lush does things differently - they look at how much a product costs to make, and then add certain percentage on to set a fair retail price. As a result, our prices are very much affected by any changes in the world marketplace.

For a long time, citric acid prices were very low, and they just kept getting lower as companies tried to compete with one another. Eventually, though, many of them went out of business, and prices then leapt up again because there was no more competition to be had. Unfortunately that had a direct effect on our retail prices, raising them rather dramatically.

As a result, when the Lush inventors started work on the new generation of colour changing bath ballistics, one of the key factors they took into accounts was the fact that they wanted to make sure that the prices stayed affordable.

One of the problems we have with ingredients like citric acid, partly because we need so much of it, is that the producers are all large scale businesses - the money isn’t going to a small community. This can make it more difficult to build up a relationships with the supplier, and when Agnes first tried to go directly to a factory rather than through a middle man she was refused several times. Eventually though, when they realised how much citric acid we actually use, they proved more willing to negotiate, and Agnes managed to get us a a 10% reduction on what we were paying for our citric. She was also very pleased to discover that the factory we buy from is actually quite environmentally aware - they reuse the waste from their sugar beet mulch to fertilize the fields.

So there’s a little bit about our citric acid - not the most exciting of ingredients perhaps, but certainly a crucial one. Next time, we’ll be taking a look at coconut oil, an ingredient we use in all sorts of products, including our soap base.

Davina at Lush Swansea x

Rose absolute is one of our finest ingredients, and we use it in all kinds of products for all sorts of different things – it’s good for mature, irritated and dry skins; it’s considered an aphrodisiac; it’s recommended by aromatherapists for grief, sadness and depression. We’re one of the biggest buyers of rose absolute in the world, so it’s really important for us that we make sure we get the very best. After we discovered that so many of our oils and absolutes were being adulterated, we had to go out and find new suppliers, and when we found our supplier for our rose absolute it was our first major buying breakthrough.

Our rose absolute comes from damask roses grown in Senir, Turkey – specifically, it’s supplied by a family run business that has been producing rose absolute for three generations. Their attitude to the environment and to their community makes them a perfect match for us. They make sure that all the energy they use comes from natural gas, and they recycle the by-products of the process back into the system. They also use the rose petals for fertiliser after they’ve extracted the absolute. As well as working to limit their environmental impact, our suppliers have also made a really positive impact on their local community, by setting up the first non-fee paying school in Turkey for children aged 3 to 6. For every kilogram of rose absolute we purchase, 25 euros goes straight to the project, and our suppliers then match that amount themselves.

They grow huge fields of roses, all of which are harvested at the same time every year, over a four to six week period around May. The roses are all plucked by hand, and the harvesting takes place early in the morning to prevent the sun from burning the oil off. The roses are put into bags which are then weighed (some people put an extra stone or even a tortoise in there to make them seem heavier!) before being spread out on the floor of a large warehouse to ensure that they don’t get too hot. To create the absolute, a solvent is then washed through the raw material, drawing out the aromatic compounds. When the solvent is removed, it leaves behind rose concrete, which is then washed through with alcohol. The alcohol is then evaporated to produce the rose absolute.

Every year, gypsies come to the rose fields to help with the harvesting process, and they set up a temporary village. Since the harvest takes place during school holidays, their children often help too. The gypsies tend to move around to a range of farms over the year as different plants are harvested at different times, but the harvesting is also done by some of the locals and there are between three and four thousand farms in the area growing roses.

To ensure that the relationship between Lush and the suppliers is kept strong and open, our buyers go back to Turkey every year, and are even able to get to know these rose pickers a bit. The gypsies have negotiated their own rate of pay, and they seem to be pretty happy with the way things are run - in one of the audits, one of the workers said, “I feel like when I’m picking roses, I’m picking money.”

We use rose absolute in many of our bestselling products, including the beautiful Dream Cream hand and body lotion, the lovely rose and lemon ballistic Tisty Tosty and our decadent shower soap, Turkish Delight. You can read more about this wonderful ingredient on our Lushopaedia, and there’s also an article about it on the Lush site in the Ethically Sourcing Ingredients section.

Next week: the rather less glamorous but still crucial citric acid!

Davina at Swansea x

What are YOU doing this Saturday?

We’ll be having a Japanese themed party in store, with origami, vegetarian sushi, J-Pop and our fabulous Furoshiki knot wrap. We’ll be celebrating all our beautiful Japanese themed products, but best of all we’ll be selling the gorgeous limited edition Japanese Aid soap. Featuring our gone-and-sadly-missed I Should Coco scent, we’re selling this little beauty for £5 - and every penny apart from the VAT goes straight to the charity Peace Boat, who will distribute the money where it’s needed most within the disaster zone.

We’re hoping to raise lots of money for a great cause and have a great time doing it - so please come and join us and help make the day a real success!

Davina at Swansea x

One of the biggest problems for Lush as a company is the need to ensure that we only buy from companies that meet our ethical standards, and that in itself makes the job of buying ingredients potentially very complicated – there’s a small buying pool available to us, and when we combine that requirement with the need for quality, it becomes a lot of work.

Essential oils are one of the key components of many Lush products. We do use them for their fragrances, but we also use them for the many other benefits they can offer – both for skin and hair and, through their aromatherapy properties, for the mind. Many essential oils are very expensive to buy. Gold prices are currently around £28,000 per kilogram, and while some of our oils are much cheaper than this – such as lemon oil, which costs £16 per kilogram – we also use jasmine absolute at £1,605 per kilogram, neroli oil at £2,016 per kilo, and oudh oil, which costs an astounding £15,215 per kilo. These ingredients are vital to our products, and of course we always want to be using the best quality of ingredients that we can – especially at those sorts of prices.

Back in 2002, the Lush perfumer was taken ill and began to train up Mark and Simon Constantine to take over in making fragrances – and in the process they discovered that many of the oils were being adulterated and mixed with aroma chemicals. When they tested them, the results were shocking – some of the rose absolute they were using was actually only 20% rose and a whopping 80% aroma chemicals. Given the ways in which we use our oils, choosing them for their beneficial effects rather than simply for scent, this was completely unacceptable. Production was halted, companies they’d bought from were blacklisted, and every one of our fragrances had to be checked to ensure that the scents would still be the same with pure essential oils – several products had to be completely reformulated.

It was then that a new era of buying began. The company decided that they needed to stop buying from catalogues and start quite literally getting out in the fields, understanding where the ingredients were coming from and how they were produced. They would cut out the middle man and begin building relationships directly with the suppliers, thereby reducing the chances of the oils being adulterated.

There are many layers to the buying process now. First off, there’s the initial finding of a supplier who we can work with, who meets our ethical standards. We then make sure we keep in contact and try to visit each supplier at least once a year to help maintain the relationship, and we carry out audits to ensure that standards are still being met. We also test the ingredients themselves regularly to make sure that they are not being watered down. We have a whole team of ethical buyers in place, headed up by Simon Constantine, who are all working constantly to ensure that our ingredients are of the best possible quality and coming from the best possible sources.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be featuring a few key ingredients here on the blog, talking about some of the fascinating stories that come out of our ethical buying initiative. In the meantime, if you want to know more, you can check out the ethical buying section on the Lush website.

Davina at Swansea x

It was an early start, setting out from the Lush flats at 7:45 on a cold and dreary Tuesday morning, but it was absolutely worth it. The Lush factory is a mysterious and strangely reverenced place, and Joan and I were lucky enough to be going for a tour.

When we first arrived we were met by our guide, the lovely Paul Shane. We once worked together in the Derby store, but then he headed off to research and development and he’s now involved in all sorts of things, including training – he’s off to Asia soon to impart some of his wisdom! Along with the two of us from Swansea, there were also staff members from the Warrington, Merry Hill and Grafton Street stores.

We started out with a brief visit to Soap and Massage, where they were making Snow Globe soap – given that this was one of our limited edition Christmas products this was a bit of a surprise! We later found out that the Snow Globe soap was actually being made for an art installation. Apparently they get quite a few requests like that – for example a massive chunk of Snowcake soap was made for the Christmas managers’ meeting so that it could be carved by an ice sculptor!

In order to mix the soaps the ingredients are added to huge barrels – almost as tall as we were – and they have to be heated to just the right temperature before mixing. After that the mixture has to be left to cool a little before adding the fragrance – if it’s too hot the scent will simply waft away! The same is true of the massage bars, and while we were there one of the workers was breaking up huge chunks of cocoa butter to make the Hottie massage bar. We were then briefly shown the cold room, where the soaps are taken to cool after they have been poured into their moulds.

We then went off to Dairy, where we saw big buckets of dried ingredients – cut rosemary, chamomile flowers, anise stars – and where they were preparing various infusions. Essentially giant cups of tea, they were making a lavender flower infusion for the Imperialis moisturiser and a fresh grapefruit infusion to go into the Ocean Salt scrub.

The Dairy area has its own heavily insulated cooling room, in which we saw huge vats of various products ready to be bottled, including The Olive Branch. It’s important to keep the products at the right temperature while they’re settling, but of course whenever a new batch of products is brought in that’s still hot it can bring up the temperature of the whole room, so they’re looking into the possibility of building another cooling room to new specifications. However since there’s talk of moving the entire factory to a new location, these plans are on hold for the moment.

One amazing thing about the factory is its biomass boiler. Used to supply the factory’s hot water, it burns all sorts of things, from broken pallets to used coconut shells. They also have a steam boiler, and as always with Lush they’re constantly looking to be as energy efficient as possible - this model is 20% more efficient than their previous one.

In the packing and filling section, we saw some of the factory workers filling bottles and tubs. They use machines to actually measure out the right amount of product, but the workers have to move the pots and bottles into place in a perfect rhythm to make sure that they are all filled correctly – and they are REALLY fast. We all watched in awe as one woman filled bottles with Breath of Fresh Air and another man filled small black pots with Almond and Coconut Smoothie – and then we had a go. They turned the machines down to the lowest speed for us, and we took it in turns to try and do it ourselves. Unsurprisingly, we all got toner all over ourselves, and I tried to get two pots’ worth of Smoothie into one – most of it ended up on my hands and shoes!

We then made our way through the huge refrigerator. It was very impressive to see all of the lovely fresh fruits and vegetables, just waiting to be used. A lot of the ingredients are delivered on a daily basis; some, such as the blueberries, are bought in bulk while they’re in season and then half are frozen to be used the rest of the year. Some of the group were a bit disturbed when the lights went out in the fridge - although it was big enough to fit all of us quite comfortably, it was very cold and the thought of being stuck inside wasn’t a pleasant one!

In the Fresh department, they were cooking up some of our lovely fresh face masks - specifically, Brazened Honey and Ayesha. They got us to help with some of the ingredients, chopping up fennel and coriander and peeling big pieces of ginger root, and we got to have a peek at some more infusions. Funnily enough, they didn’t smell of anything much - they were bubbling away on the burners but at that stage of the process hadn’t yet had any fragrance added.

The bubble bars are made in a separate building, a few minutes’ walk away. When we arrived the workers were busy making some lovely Sunnyside. We saw them putting the mixture through a big churning machine repeatedly until they were happy with the consistency, and then it started to spit out bubble bar sized blobs of pale yellowy brown dough on to a conveyer belt. On either side of the belt there were several workers, who would each grab several of the blobs and place them on a large tray, pressing them down slightly in to a flatter shape. When a tray was filled, the next one replaced it. We got to have a go at this, and it really was just like shaping dough, and oddly therapeutic.

While Joan went to have a go with the shampoo bars, I moved on to the henna, which, perhaps predictably, looked rather unpleasant. Just imagine the henna bars being soft and squishy and warm, and that’s what we were dealing with. They’d already been mixed, and we simply had to help press them smoothly into the moulds which give them their shape, making sure they were exactly the right weight. It was definitely messy, but rather satisfying all the same. They were then left in a hot room to set.

The last thing we got to do before heading back over to the main factory was also less than glamorous, but it highlighted an important issue for us. Every Lush shop has a Green Helper, and naturally, the factory has several - and one of the things they have to do a lot is washing out bottles and the black pots that our lovely customers bring back to the stores. In order for these to be properly recycled (more about that in a future blog post!) they have to be very clean, because even the smallest bit of old face mask or moisturiser can mess up a whole batch of recycled pots. So we got to do our bit, cleaning out some bottles and making sure they were ready to be put through the recycling process again. So please, if you are returning your black pots to get one of our lovely free face masks, try and make sure they’re spotless!

One of the most exciting parts of the day had us back in the Fresh department again. We split into three groups, and each group got to make their own batch of the lovely fresh Sugar Scrub. With ginger and fennel and a goodly amount of sugar, we measured and we mixed and we moulded them ourselves, and by the time we headed off we each had two almost-set scrubs to take home and use.

The whole trip was amazing and really eye-opening, but it was fascinating to get a feel for the manufacturing process by getting to follow a product through from start to finish. The precision required when it comes to measuring out the ingredients is impressive - and when you bear in mind that the sugar scrubs are probably one of the simplest things to make (otherwise I doubt they’d have let us have a go at it!) it’s a bit overwhelming. And not only do they make them, by hand, but people actually INVENT these things. Isn’t that incredible?

Because production tends to wind down around 2pm in the afternoon, we didn’t have time to see any bath ballistics being made, but to be honest, we hardly noticed - there was so much else going on!

There’s nothing quite like seeing where a product comes from to really help you understand how impressive it is, and we came away feeling very privileged, both to have seen the process first hand and also just to be able to work with products that have been made with such care.

In that spirit, we’re going to be starting a new series of blog posts, all about some of our ingredients and where we get them from - so stay tuned!

Davina at Swansea x

Come on down to the shop this Friday 18th March and get glammed up for charity! From 12 til 8 we’ll be having a movie premiere themed party, offering lovely nibbles and relaxing hand massages to make you feel like an Oscar winner! But even more importantly, all proceeds from sales of our Charity Pot Hand and Body Lotion will go straight to local charity Undercurrents, who work tirelessly to tell the stories that aren’t told on the news, focusing primarily on social and environmental justice issues. So come and join us - get pampered and support a good cause at the same time!

MAN WEEK: Another man’s favourite!

A guest post by Rory

I LOVE Ocean Salt - it’s one of my essentials. It’s really scrubby so a great exfoliator, and the lime is very refreshing, it really wakes you up in the morning! It makes my skin really soft and it’s great for avoiding ingrown hairs when you shave. It’s best to use every few days, although if your skin is particularly tough, then it’s fine to use every day!

A guest post by Tom Pearson

My wife is a Lushie and I was forced into trying some of the Lush products instead of all the usual stuff – and now if I go away and for whatever reason don’t have my Honey I Washed The Kids soap I really miss it. I find almost everything else I use – the mainstream products – very drying and the aftermath can be quite painful but HIWTK doesn’t have that effect and it smells nice! It also actively soothes my skin, which is great as I do get a bit of eczema and I’m also allergic to lanolin – so it’s great that it doesn’t contain that. I like using the It’s Raining Men shower gel as a good alternative when I’m travelling. I also use the Soak ‘n’ Float shampoo bar – it’s really effective on dandruff and it lasts for ages, so much longer then the regular bottles from the supermarket.

I don’t have baths very often but when I do I like to use a bubble bar and/or a bath bomb. I favour the bath bombs that change colour or do interesting things, though I generally avoid the glittery ones. I’ve had bath bombs in my life for a while now; blokes tend to like mechanical and electronic things, they like to know how things work; so I love the Dragon’s Egg as it changes colour and releases liquid gold (my one exception to the glitter rule!). There’s nothing like having a nice relaxing bath and trying to work out how they make the bath bomb do what it does! I used to really like the Bathos bubble bar too but sadly they don’t have it in the shops any more – but I’ve stashed a couple of bars for a special occasion!

Celestial is an excellent moisturiser – I actually use it on any little patches of eczema, where previously I’ve used GP prescribed creams. It’s also fantastic to soothe the skin on my face after shaving. The Charity Pot body lotion is nice light alternative though. I also use 9 to 5 and the Eau Roma Water when I remember and can be bothered!

I’ve tried the new Dirty body spray – it’s a great fragrance and I really like it. I’ve just tried the new hair cream too, basically it’s a creaming styling wax, it takes hold immediately, smells good and I’m already a fan!

Despite my initial reluctance, I’ve been fully converted to Lush now – and I encourage any guys wondering what all this Lush stuff is about to give it a try! It’s really not too scary to go in to a Lush shop! Hey, go in and ask about stuff for your girlfriend/wife/mum etc and then slowly move the conversation over to something for you! At least go away with a sample or two to try!

Thanks to Tom for sharing with us!

Are you a man who loves Lush? Fancy telling the world about your favourite products? We’d love to hear from you!

Davina at Swansea x