I made an order from the Lush Retro range recently and purchased a number of soaps to try. One of these was the Waylander Rhassoul soap, as I thought it sounded interesting!

***What is Lush?***
Lush is a store that makes toiletries and cosmetics, using natural and organic ingredients where possible and minimising packaging where they can. It started out as a mail order company called Cosmetics to Go, but this failed and the new store, Lush, opened in Poole, Dorset. Later branches of the shop opened in London and beyond, and there are now Lush stores all over the world. As well as in store, you can also buy products from the website, www.lush.co.uk. There are similar websites for many different countries including the USA, Japan and Germany.

Lush buy ingredients only from companies that do not test on animals. All of their products are suitable for vegetarians and many are suitable for vegans.

Lush say: "We believe in happy people making happy soap, putting our faces on our products and making our mums proud.
"We believe in long candlelit baths, sharing showers, massage, filling the world with perfume and in the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again."

***What is Retro?***
The Retro range is only available online or via mail order, as it is made up of products that have been discontinued from stores, but were deemed popular enough not to be discontinued completely. Retro products are often more expensive than the normal range of products, as they are made in smaller quantities, but there is some interesting stuff to be found among the products!

***About this soap***
Waylander Rhassoul is made from rhassoul mud from the Atlas Mountains. In Morocco it is a traditional skin and scalp treatment designed, as Lush say, for bodies that haven't seen daylight for a while. Rhassoul mud helps to soothe and treat the skin, while the pumice mixed into the soap is designed to scrub away rough skin. The soap also contains patchouli oil, which lends an earthy smell to the product.

My piece of soap looks like a piece of chocolate marble cake, mostly brown with a white base. It smells absolutely lovely: very earthy and fresh, rather like mud, but in a good way! It is a very natural scent. I have been to Morocco and smelling this soap brought it all back. It made me think I was in a hot country having a bath outdoors in a waterfall or something.

The soap is priced at £4.10, which is expensive for a Lush soap. However, I imagine it's quite expensive to import rhassoul mud from Morocco!

I decided to use the soap without a body puff in order to experience its exfoliating properties. I found it very effective at exfoliating, but gentle enough to use all over my whole body. The earthy scent came out and it reminded me of my holiday in Morocco when I had a traditional hammam massage. The soap felt very luxurious to use and I felt like I was having a special exfoliating treatment rather than my usual morning shower! There was a bit of greyish-brown sludge produced by the soap, but this rinsed away very easily when I pointed the shower head at it.

After my shower, my skin felt soft and smooth and the smell of the soap was still present on my skin, albeit not very strongly. I felt very refreshed and cleansed after my shower.

The only negative thing about the soap was that it only lasted about three uses. I didn't use it every day, just every few days, but it still lasted me less than two weeks. I'm not sure it should really be marketed as a soap, as it seems to be more like Brimstone or Glorious Mud (a scrub and a body mask).

Overall, I'm going to give this product four stars because it did feel really luxurious and did my skin some good. In particular, I had some ingrowing hairs and spots on my legs (caused by using an epilator) and found that this product seemed to help clear this up, possibly because of the scrub and the purifying properties of the rhassoul mud. However, I have deducted a star because it is expensive for a three-use soap, and it is after all marketed as a soap.