Not so Happy (Lush Happy Soap)

Member Name: pink_glitter

Product:	Lush Happy Soap
Date:	22/08/08 (128 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: smells OK

Disadvantages: doesn't lather, leaves skin with a tight feeling

I usually use liquid soap in my kitchen, and I get through quite a bit of it, because I'm very paranoid when cooking and wash my hands constantly - especially if I am handling raw meat. Normally, I wouldn't even entertain the idea of using one of my lovely Lush soaps as a hand soap in the kitchen, but I have so many of them at the moment, it will be months before I get through them all, so I decided to just do it, rather than going out and wasting money on hand wash when I have a huge box of soap at home.

I chose to use Happy, which I received as part of the Sunny Hunny Soap Stack for my birthday, along with Karma and Honey I Washed the Kids. It's worth noting, that this soap has been discontinued on its own, but is still available as part of various gift sets, and of course you can still get the odd bar on Ebay.

This soap doesn't have any 'bits' in it, like some of the other Lush soaps, but you can see little bubbles in it, which, I think makes it look a little bit similar to the B Electro soap. It is bright orange in colour - and I mean bright . In my kitchen with its pale green walls, and wooden work surfaces, this bright orange soap stands out a mile, and is now the first thing your eyes are drawn to when you walk into the room!

Amongst other things, this soap contains sweet orange oil, tangerine oil and gardenia extract. Both tangerine and orange oil have uplifting qualities and are often used as anti-depressants, while gardenia is used in aromatherapy for its relaxing qualities, so you can see where the soap gets the name 'Happy.'

With those mix of ingredients, you would probably be expecting quite a strong citrussy scent, but although it's orangey and fruity, it's not as strong as you may imagine. I think the smell is OK, but it's not one of my favourite Lush products by any means.

When using the soap, the first thing that I noticed was that it is quite solid. A lot of the Lush soaps are quite malleable, but this one was rock hard. It was possibly this, that contributed to the fact that the soap doesn't lather up very well. I found that I had to rub it between my hands quite a lot to get even the tiniest bit of lather out of it, and this often means it gets slippy and a couple of times it has shot out of my hands, once making a lovely orange mark on my white T-Shirt!

I found that initially the soap leaves my hands with a quite a tight feeling and actually leaves them with that squeaky-clean feeling if that makes sense. Having dry skin, this worried me the first time I used the soap, but I've found that this feeling disappears quite quickly, and it's never left my skin feeling dried out. The scent stays on my skin for ages after using this too, which is good.

As I mentioned, this soap is not available individually, so I can't give you a price for it, but as I said, you can get it as part of several different gift sets, the cheapest being the sunny hunny soap stack which is £7.95

My overall opinion on this, that it was quite poor and I expect more from Lush. The smell was OK, but I don't like the way it makes my skin feel straight after using it, and it annoys me that it feels so solid and doesn't lather well.

Summary: A disappointment from Lush