Waylander Rhassoul Soap

When I first started my journey into the world of Lush, I would search high and low for limited editions and rare discontinued products - scouting the forums and various social media sites with the intent of getting my greedy mitts on anything and everything that I had yet to try. While this heeded a lot of glorious discoveries, it also brought with it a lot of products that were past their best and not true indications of what they would have been like, had they been fresh. 

A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to find a rare slab of Waylander Rhassoul Soap on eBay - a discovery that initially inspired a high level of excitement, but which quickly turned to annoyance when I received a piece of soap that was as hard as a rock and good for absolutely nothing. Although I did write a review of my experience, it has been sitting quietly as a draft ever since...until now.

Perhaps one of Lush's weirdest concepts for a soap, this glorified piece of dirt is packed full of Rhassoul mud, pumice powder and kaolin - three ingredients that don't incite the best of smells, but do work wonders at exfoliating the body and replenishing the skin with their natural healing abilities. 

Much like Middle Earth Turns To Rock, this limited edition soap is not the easiest to lather up. While it does react to the running water, you have to be quite vigorous while massaging this across the body, and even then you only create a slightly grainy and rather creamy lather that spreads fairly thinly across the skin. Having said that, I don't think any more product is needed to wash with so this soap is still really effective for the user. 

What is quite a soft soap, Waylander offers a gentle exfoliation, no matter how much pressure is applied while it is being used. While the mud offers a deep cleanse - flushing out the pores and leaving it looking and feeling squeaky clean, the pumice powder gets to work at removing dead skin cells and making way for the new skin to shine through. 

While the ingredients list and colour of the product may give you an indication of what this smells like, I'd describe the soap as having a rich and dry earthy scent - like freshly dug up mud topped with a little patchouli for sweetness. The fragrance of this soap actually really reminds me of Tramp but with slightly less of a 'mossy' smell.   

My only qualms with this soap is that the nature of the ingredients, and indeed the consistency that it is presented in, means that this soap does need to be kept dry inbetween uses, and I would highly recommend that you lather this across your skin outside of the running tap. If left too wet, Waylander tends to shrink quite considerably and can almost halve the time a 100g chunk would last you (about 4 weeks).

Although I wouldn't say it is my favourite smelling or working soap, there is something rather wonderful about a soap made predominantly from mud, and I will be enjoying my two slabs of the stuff for many months to come. 

Quantitative Ingredients: Water (Aqua), Rapeseed Oil and Coconut Oil, Glycerine, Rhassoul Mud, Sorbitol, Pumice Powder, Kaolin, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Perfume, Sodium Stearate, Patchouli Oil, Vetivert Oil, Sodium Chloride, EDTA, Tetrasodium Etidronate, Sodium Hydroxide.

Vegan?: Yes. 

2015 Price: £4.20 for 100g.

2017 Price: £4.50 for 100g.

Year Of Original Release: ?