Cat Sick - Without The Fur Balls! (Lush Red Rice Soap)

Member Name: karenuk

Product:	Lush Red Rice Soap
Date:	18/09/02 (314 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very few...

Disadvantages: It stinks..., I hate it!, I wasted £2 on it :-(

As some of you may know, I’m rather a big fan of Lush. But I am not blinkered. If something is bad, I will admit it and write a negative review about it. This is one such product. So all you anti-Lush folk (Lushites!) out there, you can sit back and smirk at this one! It’s not too often I criticise Lush.

My favourite Lush products are the soaps. They are all vegetarian (and many are vegan), made from natural ingredients and not tested on animals at any stage. There are a huge variety of Lush soaps available, including some very unusual ones. Some include mud or sand in them, others have pieces of real flowers or fruit inside. Some are beautiful, others are just plain ugly. Some smell of honey or bananas, others of lemon or coconut, some seem to have a masculine scent and others a more feminine one.

This one looks like cat sick – but without the fur balls. It smells of cat sick. It is generally not nice. Sorry.

Lush red rice soap comes in huge round cheese-like slabs. It looks a bit like Edam and you need to remove the red wax before using it. You can get a piece cut off in the shop. (I can’t find it on the website so it might not be available mail order.) I bought £2’s worth in Lush at Birmingham.

It is made with Camargue red rice which seems to be the main ingredient, as you can see bits of it in the soap and it is a kind of pinky-orange colour. The rice is supposed to be slightly abrasive to help scrub your skin, while the glycerin softens.

It apparently contains tangerine, cassis and juniper berry – but I can’t detect any of those scents at all. To me, it smells very sweet, that sort of sickly sweet smell – which is possibly why it reminds me of cat sick.

When you wash your hands with it, the smell sticks too. You can still get a whiff of it minutes afterwards and it has almost turned my stomach on several occasions. I certainly couldn’t face washing my
whole body with it – rice or no rice! I much prefer to smell nice. (Hey, we could demonstrate against this soap outside the shop with placards reading ‘SMELL NICE! NO RICE!’)

So there’s not really much more I can say about it. It looks horrible – a weird colour with red and brown flecks in it. It pongs of eau de cat vomit and there is no way I ever want to buy or use this product again.

There are loads of gorgeous soaps out here and a good proportion of them are made by Lush. I suggest you avoid this one and try some I Should Coco instead. Or wait until I review some other soaps and see if there’s one you fancy. Just don’t waste your money on this one.

Summary: