I look like the Hulk! (Lush Honey Bee Ballistic)

Member Name: PyrettaBlaze

Product:	Lush Honey Bee Ballistic
Date:	14/01/08 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lovely smell, skin softening

Disadvantages: Turns everything within a five mile radius yellow

Honey Bee is one of Lush's more attractive bath bombs. Bright yellow with stripes of sandy stuff (presumably the rhassoul mud) that makes it look like a very bright bumble bee. On smelling, it gives off an unbelievably sweet honey smell. Been a sugar addict and a big fan of products that smell like sweets and honey, I had to give this a try!


Ingredients

Limonene , Linalool , Aloe Vera Extract (Aloe barbadensis) , Benzyl Benzoate , Bergamot Oil (Citrus bergamia) , Citric Acid , Gardenia Extract (Gardenia jasminoides) , Honey (Mel) , Perfume , Rhassoul Mud , Sodium Bicarbonate , Sweet Orange Oil (Citrus dulcis).
Honey Bee is one of the more natural Lush products, which is nice because as new products come out I find they are straying further away from natural ingredients and into the dodgy realm of chemicals. Aloe vera extract is renowned for soothing the skin, rhassoul mud is used in pricey beauty parlours (and Morocco) for its deep cleansing effect, and honey too is known for its soothing effects.


The smell

HoneyBee has a smell so sweet it verges on sickly. This appeals to me as I love sweet and fruity smelling stuff, but I can see how a lot of people would find this overpowering. It does smell very much like honey, and also a little like the smell of caramel being made in a pan. This is on the first whiff. Drop it in the tub and you will notice the addition of a light floral smell, presumably the gardenia extract at work. Despite the overpowering smell, the fragrance left on your skin is soft and light, but still lovely and sweet.


The effects

Aside from the horrifying Hulkifying I got (later on in the review), Honeybee is a pretty nice product to use. My skin felt lovely and soft after using it...one of the nice things about Lush is they give the bath water this creamy feeling, and you can almost feel the product working on your skin. The sandy bits could be good for exfoliation if you use the technique some people use of wrapping the ballistic in muslin before putting it in the tub. Aside from the yellow effect, this is a lovely product.


The damage

At £2.50 per bath, HoneyBee is not cheap if you get addicted to the stuff! Also, when you factor in the Cillit Bang you will have to buy in addition to this, it works out even more expensive. As with most ballistics, wrapping it well and throwing it onto a stone floor will (hopefully) break it up so you can get two or three baths out of it, which makes it much better value for money!


Oh s*&t!

Me and my bathtub are both well-used to the fact that Lush is bad, very very bad, for dyeing multi coloured rings down the sides of the bath...I imagined Honey Bee would be particularly bad, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw the sulphurous yellow colour that Honey Bee dyed the bathwater. However, little did I realise that Honey Bee would not only dye the bath, but my sodding SKIN as well! Yes, I got out of the bath with patches of yellow, looking like I was turning into a Tango version of the Incredible Hulk...bloody wonderful. Fortunately, the dye stains came off my skin with my next bath, but it's still worrying to have to put up with yellow stained skin until your next bath. I looked like I'd been rubbing cigarettes all over myself! Lush's products, being handmade, can be variable, and I have used Honey Bee before and I havent had this problem, so its likely I just got a bad batch. I should complain and get some free goodies!


Lush cocktail

When I'm feeling flush (which is never recently), combining Lush products to create bathy cocktails is one of my favourite spare time occupations. For those with a sweet tooth, try Honey Bee combined with Butterball and/or the toffee scented Ma Bar...great for curing sugar cravings! If you're more of a floral person, combining Honey Bee with jasmine scented Youki-Hi will create the sweetest smelling bath you'll ever have!


If it wasnt for the unfortunately skin dyeing incident, I'd give Honey Bee a five star rating, but sadly going around with yellow skin for a day tends to colour (no pun intended) your views on a certain product. I might well buy another one, but just to sniff in the bag, I think my days of Honey Bee baths are well and truly over!

Summary: They dont mention it makes you look like a bee as well as smell like one