LUSH
TIMES
LUSH
TIMES
18
ISSUE#003
CHRISTMAS 2024
19
IN A TIME OF Cocoa crisis
Smell like a festive snack
Featuring the gourmand stars from our Christmas 2024 collection, layer up these simple recipes inspired by your favourite festive desserts to help you smell incr(edible) all day.
year, we use hundreds of tonnes of Fair Trade and Organic cocoa butter from a handful of origins, as well as Fair Trade cocoa butter made from the beans of the Peace Community in Colombia (Comunidad de Paz San Jose de Apartado).
farmers that use organic farming methods, we are also innovating. It’s been an opportunity for innovation within our product formulations, and to increase our use of other butters that support our vision of leaving the world Lusher than we found it. Finding alternative butters that can provide the same performance and customer experience is no easy task, but luckily for us, our product inventors were able to create different blends of illipe, shea and kokum butters to use in specific products. Some products like our Lush Melts and Scrubee are being tweaked (without sacrificing the customer experience) to incorporate blends of other effective ingredients alongside cocoa butter.
Amongst the many nourishing butters we use in our products, cocoa butter is a firm favourite. A foundation of the chocolate industry, it’s a multi-functional, rich and softening butter that’s solid at room temperature but melts on contact with the skin.
Christmas Pudding INGREDIENTS
Sweet Like Candy INGREDIENTS
Sticky Toffee Pudding INGREDIENTS
our cocoa butter
Clove Orange Cinnamon
Bubblegum Candy floss Lemon
Caramel Dates Avocado butter
Smell like sugar and spice and all things nice
Satisfy your holiday sweet tooth
Get stuck in to this rich, buttery scent profile
A recent report by Fairtrade International™ estimates that in 2022, less than 15 percent of the world’s cocoa was Fairtrade™ certified, and when you add organic certification alongside that, the percentage is even lower. Since late 2014, all our cocoa butter has been Fair Trade certified and is now traceable to a specific country of origin. Cocoa is considered a high risk material for human rights violations, including child and forced labour, and environmental risks like deforestation. Fair Trade certifications provide an extra layer of verification of labour practices, as well as ensuring farmers have guaranteed minimum prices (and various financial premiums) even when market prices fall. Organic certification covers the growing practices and ensures a minimum standard of ecological care. While cocoa prices have come down from their April 2024 peak, prices remain volatile and cocoa butter prices are still around four times what they were last year. Demand outweighs supply, leaving companies in a tricky situation when they look to secure their cocoa for the year. But as we say at Lush: the problem is the solution! While we continue to buy cocoa grown by smallholder
POLAR BEAR DREAMING SHOWER JELLY £10.00 This cuddly little bear shares the scent of Snuggles shower gel, with the skin-softening powers of avocado butter. STICKY DATES LIP SCRUB £7.00 Be warned, lines will be forming for you under the mistletoe after using this sumptuously sweet caster sugar and jojoba oil treat.
SNOW ANGEL CHOIR SHOWER JELLY £12.00 Lather up with this jiggly delight, sharing the much-loved lemon sherbert scent of Super Milk.
THE MAGIC OF CHRISTMAS BUBBLE BAR £7.50
Start by soaking into comforting cinnamon leaf and warm ginger- scented bubbles.
Increasing our use of other natural butters to supplement cocoa can also have positive environmental benefits. For example, illipe butter is a NTFP (non- timber forest product) made from nuts that are wild harvested in the rainforests of Borneo. Our supplier is committed to stopping deforestation, and does this by creating market value for local materials that incentivise communities to protect the rainforest. So far, they have forest protection agreements in place with six local villages in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, that cover more than 30,000 hectares of rainforest. In addition to this incredible environmental work, the collectors also receive a Fair Trade premium for all the nuts sold to our supplier. While it’s almost impossible to imagine a future without cocoa, the current crisis brings home the importance of creating more resilience in all our agricultural systems, for everyone. Intersecting crises of climate and ecological breakdown, and conflicts, show us how fragile supply chains can be. But if we build diversity into the way we source materials, we can benefit smallholder farmers and the environment through livelihoods built on sustainable and regenerative farming.
SNOW FAIRY BODY LOTION From £10.00
CHRISTMAS PUDDING SOAP £5.00 Sultana, orange and tangerine oils will leave a hint of sweet, citrusy goodness.
Smother yourself in candy floss goodness, with an oatmeal and marshmallow infusion to leave your skin feeling soft.
But this year, we’ve found ourselves in a global cocoa crisis. In many ways, we’re in the middle of a perfect storm of intersecting issues. In a world where demand for chocolate is increasing and harvests are declining, prices for cocoa beans skyrocketed to record highs in April 2024—the result of a combination of the changing climate and ageing trees. This has driven down harvests in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, which are the biggest cocoa producing countries in the world. Understanding where our cocoa is grown is hugely important to us. As a global commodity with many stages in the supply network (from farmers, to collectors, to multiple traders and then processors), it can be really hard to gain full transparency on the origin. This is where certification has an important role to play. Each
TURMERIC LATTE PERFUME From £30.00 Finish with a spritz of our cosiest perfume,
SNOW FAIRY BODY SPRAY £25.00 Leave a cloud of Snow Fairy’s iconic bubblegum,
YOG NOG BODY SPRAY £30.00
Lock in the rich maple and caramel tones: this fan favourite scent is back for a short ‘n’ sweet festive period.
candy floss magic wherever you go.
with velvety vanilla and rich, warming
undertones of tonka absolute.
Want to know more about scent layering? Click the lush code
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