Tie a good cause to a bath bomb and watch your profits rocket
Abath bomb, for anyone yet to have the pleasure, is a dry, scented and coloured, cricketball sized sphere that fizzes when its citric acid and sodium bicarbonate components react in water, then leaves the bathwater filled (or contaminated, according to taste) with bright pigments and, possibly, floating bits.
In the case, say, of a Ylang Song Bombshell (£4.50) the customer finds herself sharing a bath, promise its manufacturers, Lush, with “a flurry of peony and everlasting flower petals”.
Given Lush’s haul of ethical awards, its buyer has the further satisfaction of knowing that her bath, as well as harmless to animals, is infused with philanthropy, the beneficiaries varying according to the country: eg geese in France, foxes in the UK, bulls in Spain.
For all the prominence of its good causes, their eclecticism, along with the rapidity with which Lush uses them up, makes it tricky to characterise the company’s ethical approach. You might call it idealistic, except that, though much troubled by the plight of, say, West Papuans, Lush is silent on the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia, where it has three stores. Or green – except who needs bath bombs?
Keen, for ecological reasons, on saving most things, Lush makes an exception for bathwater. Recently, its shop windows have indicated more concern about the issue of the UK’s reviled “#spycops” than for the recently poisoned #Skripals. It has three shops in Russia. And if an uncompromising quest for justice explains the provocative #spycops campaign against undercover policing, Lush’s shopfronts have yet to turn their unsparing gaze on Trumpian tax reforms that will, its annual report allows, “have a beneficial impact on the business”.
Maybe it’s simplest to imagine the sort of issues that, if Jeremy Corbyn were a personal care giant with, in 2017, a record turnover of £995m, he would wish young customers to associate with his Momentum bath bomb, thus allowing him to dispense with conventional marketing.
Like the late Anita Roddick, a hammer of advertising – at least, until the Body Shop was sold, because it was worth it, to L’Oréal – Lush profits confirm that displays of virtue, frequently refreshed, and including charitable donations, remain a superb marketing tool. Interviewers are apt to dote on the CEO, Mark Constantine, who notes, in return, “we invariably have an opinion on the topics journalists want to cover”.
Long before the company got round to feeling strongly about #skycops, it targeted, among other things, tar sands oil, deep sea trawling, plastic dumping, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, badger culls, foie gras farming and fur trapping, often with accompanying demonstrations, in one case a 24-hour hunger strike. For the tar sands event, “a staff member stood in a barrel, was draped with the Canadian flag and covered with molasses to represent oil”. Similarly, to address fur trade cruelty, “a brave performer sat in our window caught in a leg hold trap”. The result? “During the busy Christmas season, we managed to get over 3,000 postcards signed and sent to Canada amp; #xa0; Goose.”
As, according to a 2016 study by Melissa Aronczyk, “a savvy player in the market for virtue”, Lush has extended support to hen harriers, rainforests, sharks, freedom of movement, women’s and trans rights, not forgetting the people of West Papua. “In 2011,” it records, “in Lush stores all over the UK the Morning Star flag of West Papua was raised.”
When Lush is especially exercised, it may raise charitable funds through themed cleansing agents. The tar sands campaign featured “a molasses and aloe vera shower product”; the badger one got a badger bath bomb; trans activism had a pink and blue “Inner Truth Bath Melt”; most memorably, Lush invented an orange “Guantanamo ballistic”. As it dissolved, the bath bomb released images of Binyam Mohamed and Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj, “with text saying how long they had been imprisoned for, which floated to the surface of the water”. As with the current “spycops” reaction, the resulting distaste enabled Lush to position itself (thus surpassing the combined ethical achievements of Benetton, Anita Roddick, Innocent, Ben amp; Jerry and Vivienne Westwood) as a victim of inhumanity. After the Oracle shopping centre in Reading objected to politicised signage about Guantánamo, the lawyer and Lush collaborator, Clive Stafford Smith, took to the New Statesman to align the plight of Lush’s bath bomb demonstrators with that of prisoners of conscience. “This is familiar territory at Reprieve, where our own battle with secret prisons involves a constant struggle with senseless censorship.”
A decade on, with Lush invoking “intimidation” as the reason for removing window decorations which suggested that innocent civilians remain under threat from covert police, another freedom-ofshop intervention from Stafford-Smith is clearly overdue. Yet more fabulously for the brand, it appears that even people who disapproved of #spycops as a pretext for separating teenagers from their pocket money, will defend, if not quite to the death, the right to speak soap unto power.
In fact, given its vigilance on behalf of blameless victims, Lush is presumably poised with a replacement campaign, in which Lush activists dressed as Lush shop assistants (happily the costumes are identical), controversially pose in shop windows as themselves, while customers are invited to spend £4.50 (all proceeds this time to the Lush brand) on a limited edition Lush-themed Lush bath bomb, containing an image of a gagged Mark Constantine and text recording his heroism, which drift symbolically through the cooling bathwater, before being sucked down the plughole.
Was it right or wrong to flog coloured bicarb off the back off a craftily designed controversy whose shelf life was due, however, to be shorter than that of a preservativefree bath bomb? While commentators go back and forth, the answer surely lies in Lush’s annual financial report, due next spring.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist