I am such a big fan of Lush and I have been for years, and I attended the Lush Showcase in Manchester on 24th September 2018. I have seen the showcase on social media in previous years and it's always looked great and I wanted to attend this year myself seen as it was in Manchester.
If you don't know what the Lush Showcase is, it's an event they do where they showcase some new products, the chirstmas range and also have some exclusive products. They also have lots of things to do and look at and it's just an all round good day.
I had booked the tickets about a month or two ago on the Lush website for £20 to attend the event and I was super excited, especially after seeing all the stuff there on the social media's of the various different shops I follow on Instagram of the first day. I attended on the second day and it seemed much more quiet and chilled out.
So when you first walk up to the convention centre, this is what you see and this is so cool! It's a big display of baths and taps and loads of bath bombs. It's a good thing is was a nice day because all those open bath bombs would've been ruined. It was such a cool display and it a nice welcome to see. I will talk about this later on but for right now, this is what you see outside of the convention hall.
As we collected out wristbands and walked in, the first thing we saw was a big light up lush sign, a bandstand and some hedges shaped like the lush bunnies. As we moved pasted the band stand, we saw the fun house and some slides. I was contemplating going on the slides (because I'm self-conscious AF and didn't want to embarass myself) but I decided to go on it. As I walked into the Fun House entrance, they had a moving floor and then some of the shower jellies on some display units (that's the only way I can describe them), and because the floor was moving back and forth, the jellies were also moving and it looked so cool. They were GIANT jellies and it was so fun to slap them.
Then as we moved down, there was a small path where you could walk on top of the shower jellies and you wouldn't sink into it (kinda like the custard or fire walking when you walk across it fast, it's a solid base). I kinda wish I'd done that because it did look fun but I think I would've fallen flat on my face knowing me!
I then went up the stairs to the slide. My mum was stood at the bottom and wanted to take some photos of me on the slide and these were the outcome...
(My face on the second one though oh my god hahaha!). It was literally so fun to go on the slides and I'm glad I did go on them because they were great! Such a good and fun idea to have at a convention.
This one was my favourite! This is Harajuku and it smells like bubblegum with a bit of orange in there. I really, really wanted one of these but they weren't for sale unfortunately (well, they had a thing where some of the products on display here were available to buy at a certain time and there were limited quantities but I'd missed out on this one). I am really, really hoping that they bring this one out at some point because I know it's going to be one of my favourites.
This one is Black Rose and I am obsessed with the look of this one! I wasn't too keen on the smell, because it was quite floral, but the look of it is insane.
I actually was able to buy this one, and it was exclusive to the showcase (at this time). This one is Goddess and it's inspired by the Ariana Grande music video for 'God Is A Woman'. It's purple and glittery (what more could you want?) and I picked up two of these. The smell is a mix of floral and musk (it's not my favourite but it's manageable and there was no way I was missing this exclusive!)
Call me crazy, but doesn't this one look like a mix of a shell and a croissant? This one is called Kitsune and I can't remember what it smells like. I think I liked it but the smell didn't wow me, but the shape and colour definitely did!
They had a few others which I didn't take photos of but the ones above were my faves. Now, these bath bombs are exclusives for a new store opening in Japan which is a bath Lush store so it's just the bath products (which I really want to come here). I'm hoping that some of these exclusives come into UK stores at some point because everyone was freaking out about them.
We went back in, had another look around and decided that I wanted to go to the shop because I was just too excited. The queue was HUGE and I was gutted that we'd have to queue so long just to get to into the shop. So we joined the back of the queue and within a matter of minutes, a guy who was working at the showcase came up to us and said that we had yellow wristbands and we could just go straight into the shop. He took us down to the entrance of the shop and we just waltzed in. On one hand, I feel bad that we could just walk in and so many people had to wait hours, but I'm happy that we could just go in and browse.
These were the only picture I took in the shop because it was busy and there were so many things to look at! I do wish I'd taken more but oh well, I'm sure you'll be seeing a lot of the stuff in stores soon. The bath art is of one of the bath bombs called 'The Worlds Smallest Disco' which is part of the Christmas range this year and I am absolutely obsessed with it! Not only does it smell great, it also looks incredible! It looks like the Luxury Lush Pud bath bomb but it's black and looks cool as hell!
The shop was laid out so well and it looked great, and like I said, there was so many products and it was overwhelming! They had some of the all year round products but most of it was the seasonal stuff and exclusives. Because I only really usually use the bath products, I don't know the full extent of exclusive products but I've heard and seen there were a lot.
Anyway, I'd put far too much in my basket and I joined the queue to pay. We were in the queue for about 40 minutes or so (they had some banging tunes on and it was very well managed) and we were near the front. While we were in the queue, we noticed that it was only us and another woman with a yellow wristband, everyone else had pink ones, and I didn't know the difference between them and thought it was odd. Anyway, we were near the front of the queue and a guy came up to us who was working at the show case and said 'you've got a yellow wristband. Just wait here, I'll be back in a minute.' My mum and I were confused but just carried on queuing until a woman came up to us about 5 minutes later saying 'we've got a till for you here' and then opened the barrier and said 'we want to get non Lush staff checked out first because there's a lot of staff here.' Obviously we were grateful but we'd already queued for that long, we didn't care about skipping a bit.
That's when we found out the difference between the pink and yellow wristbands. Yellow is non Lush employees and pink was Lush employees. There were people at the showcase from all over the world and they all had pink wristbands on. There were A LOT of staff, so I just felt awkward because I was kind of just 'nope, I'm just a customer that loves the products and wanted to come.'
We were checking out, and if you know Lush, you know that they have codes for each item and it took about 5-10 minutes to check out and the girl behind the till was lovely and so patient with all the products I had. While I was at the till, I was talking to a girl next to me who worked in Lush in America and she was saying she'd bought a lot of stuff for her colleagues in the US and spending their money without them realising. She was lovely and it was a nice chat. We were talking about what our favourite product was we picked up.
My total came out and I spent *a lot* of money as I had expected but I am so happy with everything I had bought.
When I left the shop, me and my mum had one last look around the hall and were going to go on the hot air balloons (they weren't proper hot air balloons, they were on strings, but they looked amazing and there were 3 that looked like some of their bath bombs. They had Intergalactic, Twilight, and The Worlds Smallest Disco) but the queue was massive and we were both tired and wanted to go home.
We decided to leave and we got talking to a guy who was working on the bath display outside, and he was saying he worked in one of the East London stores. He was asking us if we'd had a good day and what our favourite products were that we bought. He then said 'because you've had a good day, I'll give you one of these' and then reached behind him and picked me up a Twilight bath bomb and gave it to me for free which was so lovely of him! He then got a Dragons Egg one for my mum to take home and he was showing us some of the new ones (which I had bought). He then wished us a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (obviously saying it was super early), but I thought that was lovely. He was such a lovely person and I loved talking to him.
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Overall, my mum and I both had a great day and I loved it! It was such a welcoming and inclusive environment, as well as being a fun day. The staff were all absolutely lovely and treated us so well. If you can go to the showcase next year, I would 100% recommend it because it's such a good day out.
I apologise for this super long post but I hope you enjoyed it none the less. I should have a haul going up on my YouTube channel soon so watch out for this (click here to check out my channel)
Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time! Bye xx
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