Why Lush Stores Smell Like That

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You’ll know the Lush smell — even if you’ve never stepped foot inside a branch, you’re probably familiar with it, as the plume stretches halfway up the street. It hits you like a punch in the face. You’ll be walking along, minding your own business, when BOOM! There it is. The Lush smell is a squeaky-clean flower assassin that slips up your nose and commands your attention. But what is the Lush smell, exactly?

At first whiff, the Lush smell is raw, bold, bright, loud, and unmistakable. I haven’t shopped there in a long time, but every time I pass a Lush — with 932 shops in 47 countries, there are a lot of them — I always have the same thought: peanut butter and banana milkshakes. It’s an odd association, but scent memory is a strange thing: My first Lush was next door to the best shake shop in town. That means that for me, even 17 years later, the craving resurfaces every time that flower bomb explodes in my nose.

In an effort to put my finger on the Lush smell, I spent an hour inside the biggest Lush shop in the world, found on Oxford Street in London. The place is a three-story Alice in Wonderland experience in every sense of the phrase: It’s fascinating and thrilling, and also overstimulating and a touch threatening. It’s very bright and colorful in there, with loud and upbeat music. By the door, a Lush employee whips up foam next to piles of bath bombs under a sign that reads “Great Balls of Bicarb.” Overwhelmed, I make some notes about the smell. “Soap,” I write. It’s definitely soap. “Essential oils. Herbs? Spicy.” This is not going well.

It’s surprisingly difficult to describe a scent. “I always think Lush is like a bakery: There's this great smell, but you’ll never be able to take it home,” says Janie, who’s a fan. Each product has its own smell; the Comforter bubble bar hints of blackcurrant, and the Sea Vegetable soap is clearly lavender. “It feels a bit like chasing the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow,” says Janie.

But not everyone likes that cocktail. ”The Lush smell feels like an attack on my senses,” says Karima. “It's so aggressive!”

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Lush and its infamous smell has traveled far since the company started out in 1995 in Poole, England. (The founders originally wanted to name it “The Cosmetic Warriors from the Temple of Temptation,” but the name was taken, alas.) A Lush shop resembles a food market: soap stacked high like cheese wheels, bath bombs piled up like apples, and fresh face masks on ice like a deli counter. No, you can’t eat any of it, but everything at Lush is vegetarian and mostly organic, made from fresh ingredients with minimal preservatives, synthetics, and packaging.

It’s the last fact that makes it such a pungent experience, as most of the products are kept out in the open. “The Lush smell is a mixture of our top products,” says Brandi Halls, Lush’s director of brand communications for North America. “When I walk in, I can definitely smell the Avobath bath bomb, the Karma soap, and the Vanillary perfume. These are some of our cult products.” This suggests key notes to the Lush smell include lemongrass and bergamot from Avobath, patchouli and orange from Karma, and vanilla and jasmine from Vanillary.

Halls says Lush sometimes has to take steps to comply with odor regulations. “We're often asked if we pump the fragrance out in our stores, [but] we actually spend a lot of money on ventilation systems to keep the fragrance in.” Lush does have a sense of humor about its trademark smell, having created several limited-edition products that supposedly embody the shop, like the 29 High Street solid perfume and the Oxford Street soap. “But if you're new to Lush, the shop [probably smells] like a burst of freshness,” says Halls.

If you like a scent, being overwhelmed by it can be an enjoyable experience. “Sometimes I just go and stand in there to make me happy,” says Gemma, who didn’t use to be a fan of the Lush smell, but came around after learning about the company’s commendable ethics and political outspokenness. “It’s a place I associate with good memories.”

Laura has a similar reaction to the Lush smell. “I’m often daydreaming on the street, or running around in haste,” she says. Then that soapy tang hits her and shakes her up: “Something about [the smell] clears my head of feelings and thoughts.”

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Maria Larsson, a Stockholm University psychology professor who focuses on smell and memory, says people can react very strongly and emotionally to odors. This is because signals from the nose make a beeline for the limbic system. “With smell you have an uncensored route to the oldest part of the brain, which is responsible for the most basic survival instinct that all mammals have: the ability to learn from emotional experience.”

Larsson laughs when I tell her about my Lush milkshake association. I’ll probably link the two forever, she tells me. “These types of responses are extremely resistant to the passage of time.”

People have highly individual reactions to smell. One person may love margaritas, while another had a terrible experience doing tequila shots at 21 and can’t go near the stuff. One person may feel nauseated by just a few molecules of odor, while others can handle loads without problem. Former Lush employee Lisa has to be careful around strong smells to avoid triggering migraines, but she says the shop never bothered her. “You don't really notice the smell when you're in it,” says Lisa, who has positive memories of her time at Lush. She was encouraged to get customers to sniff the goods. “Our training taught us to use imagery and emotion to describe the smell. Some products smelled like a sunny beach, while other smelled like a dark forest.”

The olfactory sense still remains something of a mystery, especially in terms of how smells trigger such strong feelings. Larsson says people are often unaware of their poor sense of smell, reacting with surprise when she tells them in her smell lab. But our noses are also important for tasting food. “There are just five basic taste perceptions — the rest is picked up by the olfactory nerve,” Larsson says.

This is good to know for when a smell offends you: Just breathe through your mouth. This is what Bernadette does whenever she goes to Lush to buy her favorite shampoo bars. “I locate the bars from outside the shop,” she says. “I grab them, pay, and go. The smell is eye-watering. It's invasive, like the sound of very deep bass reggae.”

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At the Lush emporium on Oxford Street, I keep waiting for my nose to adjust to the smell, but after 30 minutes it still came on strong. I’ve sniffed my way around three floors of this soapy Disneyland, and I’m starting to feel a little loopy. “My heart is like an open highway,” Jon Bon Jovi croons on the sound system, “I just want to live while I’m alive!”

“Yes!” I think to myself, nose deep in bath jelly, “I’m alive!” My memory’s a bit hazy from this point, but I know that I start shopping. I buy some bright purple shampoo and hippie deodorant. I add my name to the campaign to free Andy Tsege from death row. I buy lotion in support of Nanas Against Fracking.

The smell stayed with me for the rest of the day. It stuck inside my nostrils, and I could taste it in my mouth even after I’d eaten. I had a single glass of wine that night before I crashed. Now that I’ve slept it off, I understand: I was high on the Lush smell. It had short-circuited my limbic system, taking the open highway to my heart. I was lush with a little L that day — fresh, green, and drunk. For a moment I was wild and free, and so very fragrant.