Clean AND Green

For me, Lush was a natural choice (literally) when it came to all things soap-like. Although we are travelling without access to ‘normal’ bathroom facilities, that is no reason to let personal hygiene slide! However, as most of our time will be spent camping in the wilderness we are conscious of ‘treading lightly’ so don’t want to leave any nasty chemicals, artificial bubbles or plastic bottles in our wake. In addition, bottles of liquid shampoo, soaps and moisturisers are heavy and every extra gram makes the car heavier and less economical.

Our shampoo, conditioner, hand moisturiser, soap and even deodorant are all solid bars; no water as an ingredient means no preservatives and no packaging (minimising waste). Each shampoo bar lasts between 80 and 100 washes and barely weighs anything. Our deodorant does not contain aluminium to block pores (most anti-perspirants do!) using gentler elements to minimise sweating. ‘Dream Cream’ contains Camomile and Calamine to soothe sunburnt or ‘stung’ skin in addition to moisturising. Toothpaste tubes cannot be recycled (taking over 450 years to degrade!); we use solid ‘Toothy Tabs’ which weigh 5 times less and come in a recycled cardboard box. Our seaweed Sea Vegetable soap contains sea salt and antiseptic lavender oil (to banish ‘nasties’) but will not leave horrid chemicals on the ground when we wash ‘al fresco’. 

We like companies with strong environmental and ethical values; Lush does not test on animals, everything is hand-made with fresh, fairly-traded ingredients (and they don’t even advertise their products).  It’s good value too- with most expensive face creams you pay more for the supermodel who tells you how ‘great’ it is than the actual ingredients. Through careful choices like this we can be clean and smell nice for 800 days whilst minimising our impact on the planet we are exploring. 

Emma