Lush product history :

In the early 80s, Constantine read about Anita Roddick, who had just started The Body Shop. He called her and offered some of his products. She initially placed an order for £1,200 to start with, and from there Constantine and Weir developed products for The Body Shop and became the company's largest supplier for over a decade. It was at this point The Body Shop decided to buy their product formulas.

The Body Shop's purchase of their product formulas forbade Mark and Liz from opening another retail shop for five years, so they set up a mail order cosmetics company called Cosmetics-To-Go. It was a successful although complicated venture that ended up burning out. The company went into administration and sold to someone from Poole, who took the product formulas and the Cosmetics-To-Go name.

Mark and Liz, along with Mo Constantine, Helen Ambrosen, Rowena Bird and Paul Greaves from Cosmetics-To-Go, spent what money they had left on fresh fruits and vegetables at the market. In a shop in Poole, they hand made products upstairs that were being sold downstairs. They had previously been paying another company to come up with the fragrances for their products, but found out the perfumes weren't always pure, so Mark decided he would create the perfumes himself. A competition was launched for customers to give the company a new name. One customer suggested LUSH, which is defined as being fresh, green, and verdant.

Mark Constantine started mixing potions in his kitchen for Anita and Gordon Roddick and became a supplier of The Body Shop in the 1970s. Mark Constantine, a herbal trichologist, and Elizabeth Weir, had an interest in beauty therapy and thus, formed a company named Constantine & Weir. They developed a number of recipes for bath and beauty products and were a major supplier to The Body Shop, until Roddick was consulted to take more products in house. The Body Shop then paid £11 million for the rights of Constantine & Weir's recipes.

In December 2010, Mark and Mo Constantine were awarded the OBE in the New Year's Honours list, for services to the beauty industry.

*Lush products are 100% vegetarian, and often contain fruits and vegetables such as grapefruit juice, vanilla beans, avocado butter, rosemary oil, fresh papaya and coconut. However, some products contain lanolin, milk, eggs, honey, and beeswax. Parabens are used to preserve a number of the products.

A Lush Life (mission statement)

WE BELIEVE…

We believe in making effective products from fresh, organic* fruit and vegetables, the finest essential oils and safe synthetics.

We invent our own products and fragrances. We make them fresh by hand using little or no preservative or packaging, using only vegetarian ingredients, and tell you when they were made.

We believe in buying ingredients only from companies that do not commission tests on animals and in testing our products on humans.

We believe in happy people making happy soap, putting our faces on our products and making our mums proud.

We believe in long candlelit baths, sharing showers, massage, filling the world with perfume and in the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again.

We believe our products are good value, that we should make a profit and that the customer is always right.