crackerwax

I like baths. No, I love baths. Soaking away all the stress of the day in a lovely hot bath, maybe a quick gin and cranberry, possibly even a bit of Nintendo DS in there too, who knows! Of course a bath isn’t a bath without a bit of something smelly in it. This is where, for most people, Lush comes in.

Purveyors of finest bath salts and associated soapy paraphernalia, they seems to be on every high street now. Simply walking past Lush makes you feel like your nose is being raped by a bar of Imperial Leather. Wrapped in strawberry laces. Wearing Brut.

Ten minutes inside Lush is the nasal equivalent of staring at the sun through a telescope for two hours. Entering one of the stores makes you realise just what a bad idea it is to keep so many perfumed goods in one badly ventilated place. After about two minutes your eyes begin to water, a minute later you start having difficulty breathing, after five minutes you become dizzy and that’s when they pounce and make you buy a selection of bath bombs.

Not only do they get you to buy them, they make you pick them up with your fingers and put them into clear cellophane bags that have openings fractionally smaller then the bomb itself. This only adds to your sense of delirium as you stand there fidgeting with the bag, bath bombs (actually now called bath ballistics, lest people think Lush is part of a radical Al Queada cell) dropping on the floor around your feet. As pressure mounts you become suggestible to the sales assistants chatter and that’s when your judgement goes and you start buying all sorts of bizarrely named shit.

Worse is yet to come though, after making these rash purchases it’s not until you plonk it in your bath and it starts fizzing like a wasp in a Kinder egg that you realise what’s inside them. Not only do they have the sort of aroma that warps space and time it would appear that they’re made by Doctor Who. The amount of shit that comes out of those things is truly astonishing, once it’s done its job you’ll be hard pushed to see your bath for little paper flowers, bits of twig, confetti and of course glitter.

There’s fucking loads of glitter.

I once had a bath with a what was amusingly referred to as a ‘Sex Bomb’ (closest I’ve ever come) and this thing was packed with purple glitter. The stickiest purple glitter known to man. It doesn’t just stick to your bath, it sticks to your body too and you can’t get it off without a bottle of Cif and a scouring pad.

For about a fortnight after I got out of that particular bath I had a slight purple shimmer, people thought I was some kind of secret homosexual prostitute that plied their glittery night trade in perfume factories. People would be talking to me and then they’d get a slightly quizzical look on their face and start moving their head around to get a better look at my pearlescent sheen. It was embarrassing.

So, to cut a long and pointless story short, I now don’t buy from Lush. If you’ve any sense and want to be able to smell subtle aromas and any point in your life, you won’t either.