LUSH: The Creative Flair That Caught The Body Shop’s Eye Knows No Bounds

“Just as music is art for the ears and painting is art for the eyes, perfume is art for the nose.”
— Mark Constantine (LUSH cofounder and CEO)​

Basic Information

• Founded: 1995, in Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom​
• Founders: Mark Constantine OBE, Mo Constantine OBE, Rowena Bird, Helen Ambrosen, Liz Bennett, and Paul Greeves: six cofounders​
• Official websites: lush.com (global) / jn.lush.com (Japan)

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The Founders and the Brand’s Origins

One Young Man’s Rough Beginning

Any account of Lush as a company must include the turbulent life of its central founding figure, Mark Constantine.

Mark was born on July 21, 1952, in Sutton, England. His boyhood was far from smooth. After failing his GCE examinations at Weymouth Grammar School, he became homeless at 16, living outdoors in a tent among trees. He eventually began working as an apprentice hairdresser for a meager £3 a week, opening the door to his later career in cosmetics.

In the 1970s, Mark worked as an apprentice hairdresser at the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon in London and later qualified as a trichologist, a specialist in the scalp and hair. Returning to Poole, he worked at Mark Young’s Beauty Salon, where he met Liz Weir, later Liz Bennett, a freelance beauty therapist. They shared an unwavering passion for natural ingredients.

Constantine & Weir: A Close Partnership with The Body Shop, and a Parting

In 1977, Mark and Liz founded Constantine & Weir and began making and selling their own natural cosmetics using ingredients derived from plants, fruit, and herbs.

At first, sales were difficult. Their products were considered “too earnest, too authentic to be commercial,” but a fateful encounter eventually followed. Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, noticed their products, and they began doing business together when she opened her second shop.

The partnership lasted for many years. Eventually, Constantine & Weir supplied around 80% of The Body Shop’s bestselling products. Mark is said to have been deeply involved in introducing The Body Shop’s policy against animal testing, and has been credited with making a substantial contribution to its rapid growth.​

In time, however, strains developed. As The Body Shop expanded as a listed company, managers concerned about dependence on an outside supplier proposed buying the formula rights held by Constantine & Weir. Ultimately, Mark and his team sold the company to The Body Shop under a noncompete agreement that prevented them from opening independent shops for five years.

Cosmetics To Go: Mail-Order Brilliance and Failure

Once the noncompete agreement had expired, the team, including Mark, established a mail-order cosmetics company called Cosmetics To Go. It would become Lush’s direct predecessor.

Innovative products that would later become synonymous with Lush, such as bath bombs and shower jellies, were born here. The customer response was explosive, but the company had a fatal problem: its products were priced too low, and it lacked systems capable of handling the flood of orders. In 1994, overtrading combined with flooding that struck Dorset brought Cosmetics To Go to financial collapse and bankruptcy.

“The entire team was devastated. But our determination to keep making cosmetics never wavered.”
— Mark Constantine (Basenotes interview, 2008)​

The Birth of Lush: A Six-Person Revolution from the Ruins

In 1995, Mark, his wife Mo, Rowena Bird, Helen Ambrosen, Liz Bennett, and Paul Greeves started again from scratch, carrying the lessons of their failure with them.

They funded the venture from personal savings. Unable to afford lavish packaging, they decided to put all their money into ingredient quality. This philosophy of “contents before packaging” would become fundamental to Lush.

In May 1995, the first Lush shop opened at 29 High Street in Poole, Dorset. The new brand name was chosen through a customer competition. From at least 2,000 entries, the winning suggestion, “LUSH,” came from an Edinburgh customer named Elizabeth Bennett, who was not the cofounder Liz Bennett. She is said to have received one of every product then on sale as a thank-you.​

The word “lush,” with meanings such as fresh, green, and luxuriant, perfectly suited the brand’s image of natural, fresh cosmetics.​

Rapid Growth and Global Expansion

In 1996, its first shop outside the United Kingdom opened in Vancouver, Canada. The following year, 1997, brought expansion into Australia, Croatia, and France. It has since grown into a global brand with more than 800 shops in at least 50 countries. In 2011, Mark and Mo received OBEs for services to the beauty industry.

The Brand’s Commitments

“Scent Is Art for the Nose”: A Philosophy of Perfume

For Lush, perfume has never been merely an extra alongside cosmetics; it has been one of the brand’s most fundamental forms of expression since its founding. The name of its signature fragrance line, Gorilla Perfume, arose from a particular episode.

When a 2008 article described the father-and-son perfumers Mark and Simon as “guerrilla perfumers,” Mark’s younger son Jack Constantine, then still small in build, joked that his father and brother looked and behaved like gorillas. This became the origin of the name Gorilla Perfume.​

Mark Constantine is known to have synesthesia, a condition in which stimulation of one sense simultaneously evokes another. For Mark, this takes the form of smells and sounds being perceived as intermingled. This unusual neurological characteristic is thought to be closely connected with the philosophy of fusing the senses that underlies his perfume creation.

“When I make perfume, there is very little conscious thought in my head; it is almost entirely intuition. Even I can scarcely believe how I have created so many things.”
— Mark Constantine (Basenotes interview, 2008)​

Mark and his son Simon Constantine, the current head perfumer, create perfumes “while listening to music at high volume.” Mark himself says, “I cannot create in silence.” It is an unusual creative style with a strong awareness of the similarities between the “notes” of fragrance and the notes of music.

Each perfume is positioned not merely as a product, but as a work transforming memories, poetry, and fragments of life into scent. Detailed backstories accompany the products. The brand’s standing within the industry was further enhanced when perfume critic Luca Turin praised Lush’s Breath of God as a five-star masterpiece in Perfumes: The Guide (in Japanese).

A Packaging Philosophy: As Naked as Possible

Lush’s packaging philosophy is consistent: not using it is best. Many products, including shampoo bars, bath bombs, and soaps, are designed from the outset as “naked” solids that do not require packaging.​

Where packaging is unavoidable, Lush uses plastic made from 100% post-consumer recycled material, and has also operated the Bring It Back recycling program, which offers a reward for returning five used pots. In 2024, it became the world’s first global cosmetics retailer to switch all its plastic packaging to Prevented Ocean Plastic, recycled plastic kept from polluting the ocean.

A Commitment to Ingredients: Natural Materials and Ethical Sourcing

Lush perfumes make extensive use of natural essential oils and absolutes. The aim is to source ingredients from family-run farms and local communities wherever possible. Shade, for example, uses sandalwood grown through regenerative agriculture, farming intended to restore the land, in West Timor, Indonesia.

Lush has one of the industry’s strictest policies on animal testing. Under its own Supplier Specific Boycott Policy, it uses no ingredients at all from suppliers that have ever conducted animal tests. All its perfumes are vegan.

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The Fragrance Lineup

The Roots: Thirty Years Beginning with Karma

Lush’s oldest fragrance is Karma, created by Mark Constantine himself in 1995, the year the company was founded. Patchouli and citrus notes, including orange, lemongrass, and lavender, are layered with pine, elemi, and cinnamon. It was conceived as a homage to the incense-filled hippie streets of London in the 1960s and 1970s.

The name Karma is said to have come from a staff member helping prepare the shop for opening, who received a parking ticket for a flower-painted VW van and muttered, “Bad karma!” Thirty years on, it remains a uniquely enduring fragrance that Lush has continued to sell.

B Never Too Busy to Be Beautiful (2003–2009): The Dawn of Perfumery

In 2003, on an idea from cofounder Rowena Bird, the sister brand B Never Too Busy to Be Beautiful, referred to here as B, opened on London’s Carnaby Street as Lush’s “glamorous younger sister.”​

B began with Rowena’s wish to recreate her childhood memories of playing at her Aunt Penny’s dressing table. With gold-leaf walls, fabric flowers, and glittering chandeliers, its interior resembled a cabinet of curiosities, presenting an entirely different world from an ordinary high-street shop. Its packaging is said to have drawn inspiration from India and Morocco.

Among the fragrances created by B, Breath of God is especially renowned. Composed by Simon Constantine, it intricately interweaves cedarwood, rose, ylang-ylang, vetiver, lemon, grapefruit, neroli, and more. As noted above, Luca Turin called it a five-star masterpiece. Many other perfumes that would become signature Lush fragrances were also born here, including Dear John, Dirty, Fantabulosa, and Lust.

B closed in 2009–2010, and its spirit and fragrance collection were integrated into Lush itself, continuing as Gorilla Perfume.​

Gorilla Perfume Volumes 1–4: Perfume as Exhibition

Lush began presenting perfume in earnest under the Gorilla Perfume name in 2010.​

Volume 1 (2010): The first Perfume Gallery was held in Shoreditch, London. Its exhibition-style presentation, allowing visitors to experience fragrance through multiple senses, made a powerful impact on the industry and later traveled to New York and Tokyo.​

Volume 2 (2012): “Set in Stone”: Unveiled through an installation in which a stone circle was actually constructed on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, with each stone scented with a different perfume. The collection brought together nine unisex fragrances themed around a profound connection with nature, and a dedicated soundtrack was also created.

Volume 3 (2014): “Death, Decay & Renewal”: A collection themed around death, decay, and renewal, created in a year when Mark and Simon confronted bereavement and the loss of people close to them. It includes Dear John, which Mark made by imagining the father he had never met. Mark later learned that his father was alive in South Africa and met him for the first time. The Dad’s Garden series was subsequently inspired by his father’s garden.

Volume 4 (2016–2017): “Samples of Society”: A collection themed around home, born of an encounter with Texas-born photographer and artist Hal Samples. Simon transformed into scent the stories of people living on the streets and “forgotten people” that Hal had documented.

The Perfume Library: Fragrance and Archiving

In 2019, Lush opened the world’s first Perfume Library by Lush at its flagship Liverpool shop. The same year, the Shinjuku shop in Japan opened Asia’s first Perfume Library.

In July 2024, a standalone, permanent Perfume Library shop opened on Beak Street in London’s Soho. With internationally acclaimed perfume brands such as Le Labo, Byredo, and Ffern in the same neighborhood, it marked a symbolic moment in Lush’s recognition as a serious fragrance house.

The Current Range and Its Perfumers

Lush’s fragrances are currently created primarily by three in-house perfumers:​

• Mark Constantine (cofounder, 1995 to the present): creator of Karma, Dear John, Time of the Season, and other fragrances.
• Emma Vincent: creator of hits including Turmeric Latte and Salty.
• Alina Gliwinska: released her first permanent-range perfume, Alina, in 2023.

The fragrance lineup is offered in several formats, including liquid perfumes in 30 ml and 100 ml sizes, solid perfumes, wash cards, which are soap-like fragrance samples, and body sprays.​

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By the Way…

• Mark Constantine once said in an interview that the work for which he most wanted to be remembered was not perfume, but the study of birdsong. An enthusiastic birdwatcher since the 1970s, he cofounded The Sound Approach in 2000 with Dutch and British ornithologists to study and record bird vocalizations, and remains involved today. It has grown into one of the world’s leading private bird-sound databases, with an archive of at least 83,000 recordings.​
• The bath bomb was one of Lush’s earliest inventions, but the bubble bar began as a packaging-free deodorant. It emerged from the accidental discovery that the product bubbled and foamed when put in water. The idea was patented in 2001, becoming Lush’s first patent.​
• Mark later recalled that in the 1990s he would get up at four every morning and listen to records while making cosmetics in his garage. That habit has continued, and he reportedly still rises early each day to develop new products and perfumes.​