The State of Perfumes at Lush - Spring 2023

Perfumes have gone through a lot of change in recent years at Lush. The initial spectacle of Liverpool's expansive Perfume Library in 2019 brought a wave of excitement to fragrance; when combined with the anchor-exclusive black labels and the white labels available nationwide, it meant that over 60 different Lush perfumes were accessible in the UK for a period of time, and that didn't even take body sprays into account. However, much like the celebratory Harajuku bath bomb range, this maverick move of reintroducing 30 forgotten fragrances went as quickly as it came, and between 2019 and 2022, what was once an apothecary of curiosities was transformed into a turnstile-admittance graveyard for perfumes leaving the core range, with the obscurities being condemned to, well, obscurity. I'm sure the pandemic is at least partially to blame for this, but it doesn't change the fact that the intention of the Perfume Library has been discarded, and the landscape of Lush's perfumes has been left looking rather stale.

Since spring 2022 though, where Love, 1000 Kisses Deep and Ginger were promoted/demoted (depending on your perspective) from white label to gold status and Keep It Fluffy was inducted alongside them into the Perfume Library, very little has changed. There have been some nominal seasonal movement in both fine fragrance and body sprays, but no AYR discontinuations since the last bottles of Lord Of Goathorn were finally snapped up from the website mid-2022. For a perfume lover like myself, this is perhaps the biggest reason I've become a bit jaded with the current selection - it's become stagnant. But what is important to remember is that not all changes are so black and white (or gold for that matter!), and that Lush's strategy has been a lot more lateral of late.

You see, Lush's perfume department isn't just perfume. It isn't even just perfume and body sprays. The definition extends to candles and wax melts, and after trialling Snow Fairy-scented candles and melts for Winter 2021 and 2022 respectively, both these subcategories of product have become permanent fixtures to stores and, by extension, the fragrance range. Basically, rather than expanding the variety of scents available, the focus has been on expanding the ways in which we can access them.

This shift is definitely a wave that Lush have been riding for a few years. When it became clear that Sleepy shower gel was a hit one Christmas, they capitalised on its popularity and continue to do so to this day - it's the only scent that currently has both a melt and a candle, as well as the matching Twilight body spray. More recently, other scent families are following suit - Rose Jam, Avobath and Karma have all had new additions, either permanent or temporary, and I can see Sticky Dates and, of all things, Grass, going a similar way, to appeal to the more niche markets. And of course, we can predict that Lord Of Misrule and Snow Fairy will get the same annual treatment indefinitely.

The only entirely new scent to come out of all this home fragrance malarky is Va-Va-Voom, a strawberry and jasmine melt, which I don't see ever working as a fine fragrance, as it doesn't have enough depth to it. With the exception of Karma, all of the most recent additions to perfume did not start life as a designated perfume. Granted, Lush's ECs are all made in house by the perfume department, so it's all created in the same place, but so many of Lush's perfumes were designed as such, and this seems to be becoming an archaic practise. As more and more lines of scent families saturate the entirety of the store, the light of the Perfume Library gets dimmer and dimmer. I fear for scents like The Smell Of Freedom and Superworldunknown, and even white labels like Breath Of God, that don't have those lateral connections to elsewhere in the shop. Even with these outward links, it doesn't guarantee the safety of a cult perfume that's expensive to make - just look at Salarium.

So that's how things are looking right now. Not necessarily bleak, but the real perfume nerds among us are treading water and should probably be conserving their energy to do so for a while. It could be a long time before what feels like a truly progressive change, as I'm sure there'll be a lot more reinforcement of existing popular smells to come first. That said, it's definitely worth keeping an eye on those gold labels, and maybe some white too; low sales thanks to focus being pulled by candles and melts could easily lead to withdrawal of even more cult classic scents. But if you're anything like me, you'll have back-ups of your favourites in storage, ready to outlast the supplies of the shops!