*Music
This is Poole harbour, just a couple of miles away from the Lush UK factory, it's about 7:30
in the morning and we are going to get one of the freshest ingredients that we use - seaweed.
It all started as a as a bit of a favour really, because originally Lush were getting their
seawater and seaweed from the Hebrides, one of the Shetland Islands, or something like
that, thinking it was less polluted up there I suppose, cleaner seas. We sort of pointed
out that there's nothing wrong with our seas here it's just as clean as anywhere in the
world really. And it's so local as well obviously there's less transporting, less pollution.
There's nothing, nothing at all you know? Yeah. And it is a harvest, it's not it's not we're only picking
the tops of the weed, so the weed grows back so it's a replenishing thing you know, and there's
plenty of it. So how many times would you go out to get the seaweed? It's pretty well, once a
week now, the products have proved very popular so I go out so pretty regularly once
a week for them. Yeah people love them I mean I love them like BB Seaweed face mask
myself I think it's really lovely, although in the beginning I was really scared when we were making
it, because sometimes the seaweeds has a little crabs in there I'm kind of scared of them.
We do try, I'll share a little process I go through when I pick a seaweed just trying to remove as
much livestock as I can, but you get the occasional, you get an occasional fella that creeps in.
How many kilos are we collecting today? Well we'll collect about 25 kilos for today, which is the
sort of average amount we take. Okay. This is Toothed Wrack, what we normally do with it, we just
take the tops and leaving the roots on the rock, you see it just grows back very very rapidly.
People at the factory have been complaining lately because there's been a few crabs and a few things
mixed in, so what we do, we just generally give it a rinse now.
So I could potentially have a crab in here yeah? You could do yeah, so as we, as you rinse it out, most of the creepy-crawlies go with it.
So if we pick most of it today, because it's so resilient, when you come back here next week
most of all kind of grow back? I'd say give it three weeks, three weeks and the new growth has
already start to come back, you know but as you can see this lots and lots of it, so you
never come back to the same spot because just we just keep
moving on and eventually, say six months later, or a year later, you'll come back to where you
first harvested and then it'll just be full again. I've got a friend who grows oysters just up
there so we get tested every month, the oysters get tested at source and the sea, the sea quality
gets tested every month, so I know just on our on our other business that things are as good as
it should be, you know. And because the harbour's has two tides a day, it's a you know you
just got it's just replenishing the seawater all the time it's fresh and incoming all the
time so that's why it stays so good. And seaweed won't grow just anywhere I mean the
quality of the water has got to be good for sea, well the conditions got to be right before
see me to grow and as you can see along the stretch here this is ideal you know, the seaweed loves it.
Just by being really careful, just by washing it, you know we can save ourselves a lot of quite a
bit of wildlife. Quite a lot of little shrimps now that will be nesting in the weed you can see now
is these little sea fleas, see them? Yeah sort of a larvae and shellfish. Well I'm glad I didn't seen them when I was
picking it because I'll probably be screaming. There you are and all that just gets returned back to the sea. Back to
the sea. So this is our freshly harvested seaweed, about 25 kilos, although seems like a tonne
now we're going to take it back to the factory to the fresh room and turn into a face mask.
Right, so now we are in the fresh room just arrived here with our beautiful fresh seaweed and Camilla
up one of our fresh compounders is going to guide me through of how to make a fresh face mask called BB Seaweed.
Right, let's get on with it. So here is the bowl of infusion that Camilla prepared a bit earlier, we have to
get infusion few minutes before we start doing the face mask because it has to cool
down. Now we put in the bentone and we blend it for a few minutes. Aloe vera and water. So now the
infusion is ready to go, we have to wait maybe 15 minutes for it to cool down and while we're
waiting we're going to get on with the seaweed the fresh beautiful seaweed that we harvested this
morning, we're going to weigh out what we need Camilla how much do we need? We need 40 50 grams.
Now we're going to wash the seaweed because Camilla said you have to rinse it and then wash it again
in boiling hot water and then rinse again before we can put it in the face mask. Like you see
it's changing the colour, it's much more green now. So we're adding 800 grams of glycerine to our seaweed.
So now we have Helen Ambrosen joining us, hello Helen. Hello. Helen is one of the original Lush
co-founders and she's also our inventor and she invented the BB Seaweed face mask, so now we're going to talk
about seaweed, let's talk about seaweed Helen. We are, well these are such beautiful clever plants
and in fact this isn't technically a plant it's it's an algae its latin name is fucus serratus
and I chose this for several reasons, it grows very prolifically you know you saw that when you
went out to have a look. It grows throughout the world and so it means that our manufacturing
units in Japan and Canada can get this seaweed or something very very similar to it and they
can use it in BB Seaweed face mask as well. It's a great plant it grows all year round so it means
that we can source it all year round as opposed to something like this little green sort of seaweed
here which is a type of sea lettuce, that only grows in the summer. When we are looking at its
properties, we can see that it's protecting itself by using mucilage and you can feel that on the
surface of the leaves and it's also in the plant as well and that stops the seawater withdrawing
moisture from the plant so that's part of the way it's protecting itself but that mucilage
is really great for the skin here in particular also good for the hair and so in the way that
I've asked you to process it, we're extracting that mucilage and what we're doing here is
we're using all the lovely vitamins and minerals in this seaweed and we're getting them straight
onto the skin, we're using the whole thing and there is a real effect in that. So Helen where
did the inspiration for the BB Seaweed face mask come from? Well we were asked to do television programme
called "Girls On Top" and this was a programme where two television presenters basically went to all
sorts of different industries and tried doing different people's jobs so they came to Lush to
pretend to do my job as it were really, so I knew that I had to invent a lovely products for them
for this television programme and we just started using fresh seaweed and we all thought what a
lovely thing it would be to do to make a face much specially for this television programme and so we
also came up with the name BB Seaweed because it was made for the BBC. So the girls came
down and we did some lovely filming on Poole Quay you know where the seaweed arrived on Poole Quay and then
we went to the lab and we made the product in the lab and we kind of invented it in the lab
and then we took it to the local sports centre where the local football club were training and
we gave them all a pot to try and they went into the showers, used their facemask and then came out
and then myself and the two lovely presenters were able to stare into their eyes and look at
their skin and say "is your skin much better now that you've used this product?" and they all said yes
that was lovely and so that's where the product came from.
Smooth as silk. Yeah pretty good no need to shave in the morning. Yeah really smooth. Really soft on the chest. And did it come off well? No not really.
Lovely, thank you very much Helen, thank you. And now we're going to get back to our work and finish off the lovely BB Seaweed face masks.
So now we're going to add some rose petals and olive oil into it.
Putting in the honey, and now we're going to mix it again.
We'll pick up the bucket with the seaweed, roses, honey and olive oil, gycerine
and we're chucking in everything to our infusion we made before.
Now we're putting in the most important things that's the fragrance of BB Seaweed.
So it makes the facemask really nice and smelly. So the millet flakes.
Almond grounds.
Now we're going to mix it for the last time and then we're going to get the ready product.
Right so now Camilla is going to take two samples from the face mask and one
of them will keep them and one of them will go to micro tech to be checked for microorganism
which we know is really important for us. Camilla feel free to take it.
And now this is done we can get on with this and fill in the pots the ready product.
Seaweed fresh from the sea today and BB Seaweed fresh in the shop today made by Camilla
and me, I think I do most of the job anyway, but fresh in the shop within a few hours.