All stacked out! (Lush Christmas Soap Stack)

Member Name: sweetpea01

Product:	Lush Christmas Soap Stack
Date:	29/07/09 (68 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great affordable gift

Disadvantages: Limited edition

Today at work I received a charity christmas card brochure! I couldnt believe it! Its that time where Christmas is being mentioned more and more! Soon it will all be in the shops and before you know it December is decending upon us once again! Lush always do a great range of Christmas gifts but they also have their value range in the form of the Christmas Soap Stack. They have done this gift quite a few years and changing it each and everytime. Im reviewing three versions so this may be quite long!

Christmas Soap Stack 2003

Contains (2003): 100g each of Merry Christmas (Here It Is), Orange Spice And All Things Nice, & Snowcake Soaps

In 2003, Lush started selling various "Soap Stacks," which are three 100g specially poured, rectangular bars of soap, wrapped in cellophane and bound together by colour coordinated rubber bands. For Christmas of that year, they introduced their very first Christmas Soap Stack, a clever stocking stuffer that gave Lushies the opportunity to try all of the newest Yuletide Soaps, with the added benefit of providing unisex fragrances that made it a particularly good gift for the guys.

Of all the Christmas Soap Stacks since, this has never been more true than in 2003, with two of the three soaps generally being deemed a bit "meh" by the ladies, yet more often being appreciated by the blokes. Topped with a red and green card, this particular stack of soaps is green, white, and orange, much like the Irish flag (or the Mexican flag, depending on how you look at it). The green soap slice is Merry Christmas (Here It Is): this is Lush's so-called "Christmas tree scented" soap -- though in usual Lush style, it aims at a bit more complexity than most seasonally-themed pine scented products on the market.

This complexity works both for and against it: containing more "perfume" than pine, and with the addition of cleansing cedarwood, peppery fennel, refreshing lime, and sweet gardenia, it's torn between giving off a Pine Sol air and a more masculine, sports cologne aroma. Despite these layers and because of the aforementioned year-round sporty air that shares pine's stage, as a holiday soap, Merry Christmas (Here It Is) surprisingly tends to be a bit bland and even weak at times, lacking a certain amount of the festive, spirited charm that most Lush Christmas Soaps are famous for.

The white slice in this gift is Lush's beloved Snowcake Soap, always guaranteed to make a limited seasonal comeback since its debut in 2000.Reeking of almond paste, it's creamy, smooth, and gives you mounds of snow-white lather while keeping your sweet tooth at bay throughout the holiday season. The third and final soap slice is Orange Spice And All Things Nice, which is basically a tweaked version of Lush's year-round Red Rooster Soap (incidentally, another natural favourite with the blokes, that.) Lush simply shifts a few of Red Rooster's ingredients here: they take out the embedded cinnamon sticks and a bit of the clove, put in an extra splash of airily sweet gardenia, and replace anise with lemon oil -- all of which allows the fragrance of fresh orange juice a bit more prominence above the smoky, spicy notes. The result, in my opinion, is that while Orange Spice still possesses Red Rooster's odd, slightly sickly yet smoldering acquired taste, its fragrance is a bit more well-rounded than its counterpart, with more room for subtlety amongst the various notes, and a slightly louder early morning wake-up call than Lush's traditional rooster offers.

Aside from Snowcake, these aren't necessarily Lush's all-time greatest seasonal soap creations -- nor are they the most memorable -- but they're still useful for turning the most stubborn of blokes away from soap-stocked grocery store aisles and onto the slow road towards becoming one of the
Lush soap using faithful.

Christmas Soap Satack 2004

Contains (2004): 100g each of Angel's Delight, Snowcake, & Spice Mountain Soaps

After being introduced in 2003, Lush's Christmas Soap Stack made a return the following year, with another set of three soaps even better than the last. Now, I generally recommend the Christmas Soap Stack for everyone on your gift list -- including guys, as the scents are always masculine enough to cross the gender barrier with ease. But with this year's girlier coloured stack, you might find yourself having to gently reassure the man who unwraps this gift and gasps at the sight of purple and pink hues.

That shouldn't be too much of a problem, though: 2003's soap collection was naturally sportier in both colour and scent, but this year's soaps are deliciously foody (and we all know that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.) Though it be pink, the stimulating orange and tonic tangerine-filled Angel's Delight fills your head with visions of sugar plums, fruit-flavoured candies and tropical punch. And while Angel's Delight is generally sold in bulk with glitter and stars on top, in this singularly poured gift mold, it doesn't come bedazzled -- it's plain, pink, and positively delectable as always.

So, despite what you may have thought and feared, there's no glitter to explain away to the gents! Just get their head around the pinkness, and from the second they pull this soap closer to their nose for a first sniff, you'll be good to go. From there, you'll not have a single darned thing to explain when it comes to Lush's Snowcake and Spice Mountain Soaps. Snowcake is a natural favourite of both men and women alike, as its marzipan and sugar paste fragrance dispersed via buttercreamed lather leaves you dreaming of cake, cake, cake! (And again, though Snowcake was sold with irredescent glittery-bits of shrapnel-like confetti on top in 2004, the rectangular version found in the Christmas Soap Stack is simply pure as the driven snow.

No shards of glass to be found, and thank goodness for it!) Lastly, Lush's deep purple Spice Mountain Soap is, in my opinion, one of their all-time greatest Christmas fragrances: it gives you a rich burgundy wine lather and smells like mulled wine served in a party-sized punch bowl, garnished with cinnamon sticks, orange peel, and fresh berries. I challenge anyone -- whether male or female, whether earthling or martian -- not to become mesmerized by this lavish soapy concoction. So there you have it: three soaps, all supercalifragi-scrumptious. The only downside? Because the soaps are not individually wrapped in plastic, the scent of one soap merges with the others, and they each absorb the others' moisture, as well. But once you separate the soaps and leave them on their own in a soap dish for a day or two, they find their individual identities once again.

And the plus-side is that this year's Christmas Soap Stack is filled with 100% perfectly complimentary fragrances: I mean, are you really going to mind if Lush simultaneously offers you a slice of almond cake and a glass of mulled wine in the shower? Hmph, I think not!

Christmas Soap Stack 2005

Contains (2005): 100g each of Angel's Delight, Snowcake, & 'Twas The Night Before Christmas Soaps

Christmas Soap Stacks are the best stocking stuffers that Lush has on offer, and being that their annual, limited edition Christmas Soaps' scents generally tend to be unisex, you can give them to just about anyone without worrying about the psychologically malfunctioned male response of "Lush is for girls". In fact, a Christmas Soap Stack is actually the perfect way to cure the men in your life from such mental diseases. (It's certainly worked for me, ...year after year after year.) AND you can give this gift every single year -- over and over again to the same people if you'd like -- as the assortment changes with the Lush times. (How's that for a pun?)

Similar to 2004's Christmas Soap Stack (see the review above), you get a slice of French almond cake in Snowcake Soap and a bowl of colourfully wrapped fruit-flavoured candies (the posh kind that are flavoured with real fruit juice) in Angel's Delight. But for 2005, last year's wine-coloured slice of Spice Mountain has been replaced with an even deeper, more mysterious purple-blue hue, thanks to the antidepressant blackcurrant Twas The Night Before Christmas Soap. Not quite as savoury as Spice Mountain (whose sweet spiced berry fragrance tended to be accentuated over time), Twas The Night Before Christmas actually loses a bit of its playful candied berry goodness as the calm of herbal lavender and chamomile increasingly takes over.

That's not to say it becomes altogether displeasing; it's just that its youth-restoring citrus notes tend to get tripped up by these more sedated, settled-down herbs. And being that this soap is packaged with the other two foodier-fragranced soaps (none of which are individually wrapped), these herbal obstacles tend to make their way into your almond and cotton candy soaps, as well.

But while that's worth mentioning, it's really nothing to worry Santa's bearded, chubby-cheeked little head. Once you separate the soaps and leave them on their own in a soap dish for a day or two, they learn how to be themselves once again. So there you have it: three soaps, wrapped in cellophane and bound by two coloured rubberbands. Of course, I don't think this year's collection is quite as fabulous as last year's, but when it comes to Christmas Soap Stacks in general, I still recommend stuffing them in every stocking you see, every year. For those recipients who have been more naughty than nice, even the lesser of Lush's aromatherapeutic Christmas Soaps are guaranteed to give them a head start towards a new year of gentler, kinder behaviour.

Now I dont know about you but I'm all stacked out so need I sumarise?! I dont think so!

Summary: Good things come in small packages!