Lush Blogger Event Sydney - December

Let me tell you a story about long ago...well, a couple of years ago. I moved into a share house with an old friend and his lovely girlfriend, and soon discovered she worked at some shop I'd never heard of called Lush. She always smelled AMAZING, and her bathroom was always overflowing with fizzy bath bombs, and delicious soaps, and mysterious powders and lotions. After about the fiftieth time I asked why she smelled so delightful all the time, she insisted I try some of her wonderful things. From then on...well, I was pretty hopelessly converted. Now I'm the kind of shopper who wanders into Lush of a lunchtime and look like I'm browsing aimlessly, but when the unsuspecting shop assistant comes over to help me I can rattle off the exact specifications of what I'm looking for. I've been using their henna ever since I stopped dying my hair crazy colours, and always make sure I have one of the Godiva shampoo bars on hand. While I know there are some less awesome things about the company as a whole, I know what products I like and I quite like an awful lot of Lush.

Lush stores are just ridiculously fun to photograph.

So it's not particularly surprising that when Lush invited me along to their recent blogger event in Sydney I was just ALL OVER THAT. I don't normally stay out until the ridiculous time of 9PM on a school night (I know, I know, I'm such an old nanna) but in this case it was worth every minute - the event was enormous fun, and not only did I get an enormous bag of swag, we did a bunch of fun activities based around showing off the lovely Lush goodies.

These adorabubble little bath ballistics are called Secret Santa

Lush put out a special, limited edition Christmas range every year, and considering the timing of the event this Christmas range was unsurprisingly the focus of the evening. I'm kind of blown away by just how HUGE the Christmas range is this year - there's over thirty new products all together, which is just nuts. Angel's Delight soap and Snow Fairy shower gel are back, which makes me extremely happy, even if Mr. Reluctant Femme thinks they make the bathroom smell like fairy floss. Apparently this is a bad thing, I don't know. Angel's Delight has always had delightful little stars floating around in it's multicoloured base, but they've apparently started using a different type of glitter this year that's entirely biodegradable. It still smells amazing and looks just as gorgeous though, which is a neat achievement. There is also a new massage bar available in the same sugary, sweet scent as these two tasty treats, so you never have to not smell like a lolly shop!

This is what an entire, intact wheel of Angel's Delight soap looks like.
One day, it will be mine.

As for the rest of the Christmas range, I'll take you through a bunch of them in the next post so you can really savour all the deliciousness (and so I can play with them some more).

Once all the bloggers finished squeeing over all the goodies in our swag bags (it took a while and required frantic bell ringing), we were split into two groups to do a bit of a Lush round robin. I wandered over to the side of the shop where they were waving pretty scarves around first. Lush have scarves available as a reusable alternative to traditional gift wrapping all year round (which I think is brilliant) and they have some new Christmas design scarves they were wanting to show off.  In order to show us how versatile these scarves are, the staff showed us all how do some pretty, useful things with them. The first exercise was tying the scarf into a cute little flower using a deceptively simple series of ties, and I'm pleased to say I NAILED IT.

Look at this! Fancy as FUCK.

Me making a FANTASTIC impression on my fellow bloggers.

The second exercise was an attempt to teach us a tie designed for wrapping presents, that was apparently inspired by the Japanese craft furoshiki. There are however, no pictures of my attempt at this exercise. It was SUPPOSED to look like an adorable little flower with leaves, growing from the top of a pot shape, but mine was...it was not good. Instead here are some much better executed examples of furoshiki from Better Living Through Design.

Once I gave up on mastering the stupid scarf tie thing that I didn't even want to do anyway SO THERE, I rotated around to the other activity and watched  one of the staff members at the QVB store mix up an amazing smelling batch of Cupcake fresh face mask.

The cosmetics kitchen, ready to go

Adding linseed mucilage (made by boiling linseeds), which looked amazingly similar to snot

The chef du jour

We all got a little pot of the finished product to take home, and after handing it to Mr. Reluctant Femme to smell, I immediately remembered why I'd stopped using this brilliant face mask. It smells like chocolate. It looks like chocolate. IT SHOULD BE CHOCOLATE. But as Mr. Reluctant Femme discovered, it is not chocolate. It's a special kind of torture sitting with this substance that smells SO MUCH like it would be delicious, knowing it's just going to taste like mud if you eat it - but it does do amazing things for my skin, so I'll deal with it.

To round out the evening, most of us got lovely hand massages with Lush products while the staff of the QVB store serenaded us with a cover of Love Shack, where the words were rewritten to be about baths and bath bombs.

What amazingly good sports.

And then I went home and still smelled really good when I got up the next day, The End.
Tomorrow I'll have another picture heavy post where I show you all the glorious goodies I got to take home with me!