Many a time over the last couple of months I have found myself being swept into a conga around the room, wondering how my life has reached a point where I consider this to be a form of entertainment. Despite the masses of personal growth I have achieved over the last two years, it’s obvious that I haven’t lost my party pooper streak it seems.
One of a handful of exclusive shower jellies that Lush have brought out for the Liverpool store, Conga is perhaps the prettiest of the lost. Sporting a fluorescent pink colour, not to mention a brand new fragrance from the company, this jelly is like Pink Custard’s more vibrant younger sister.
Before I describe the merits of this particular jelly, I should start by saying that I’ve come to appreciate these wobbly inventions far more over the last few years. As a shower gel connoisseur, I have always considered these solid jellies as more of a hindrance than their bottled counterparts. However, with experience and experimenting, I have now found so many ways that these products can be utilised, so I am far more open to receive these solid renditions than I once was.
The most obvious way is to use the whole jelly at once: massaging it either directly across your body or between your hands, before using the lather to clean you’re skin with. While smaller 100g jellies seem to work fairly well when stimulated with your palms, I find that the larger ones are quite difficult to hold for very long, and I usually find the product ends up on the floor more times than it does across my body.
If this doesn’t work for you, cutting your jelly up into smaller pieces means that you have better control of creating a lather between your palms. Having said that, there is now the issue of the shower jelly being too small to handle, and the same frustrating game of handling it becomes an issue once again. There is also the factor that smaller pieces find it easier to slip down the drain before they’ve been used very much at all.
If you are choosing to use the jelly in either of these ways, please be mindful of the fact that you should avoid exposing them to the water too much. While Conga isn’t at all ‘crumbly’, I have had jellies fall apart on me in the past, not to mention the fact that the product will shrink a lot quicker with constant direct exposure to the running water.
If you find that shower jellies, in their wobbly format, don’t work for you at all, there is always the option of blending the jelly into more of a thick paste, or indeed that of a gel. Simply take half of your jelly (store the rest somewhere else) and throw it into the blender for a minute or so. If you want more of a gel-like consistency, you’ll need to add a little water as well. As a warning though, adding water reduces the shelf life of this shower jelly somewhat, as the product is now a breeding ground for bacteria. Without water, the blended jelly can last a good few years - as you would expect a jelly to do so; with water, a couple of months is probably the maximum amount of time I would continue using the mixture before I’d need to consider whether it’s healthy to be putting it onto my skin.
Finally, despite its name, if you don’t wish to use Conga in the shower, you could always cut a small chunk off and hold it under the running tap - along with the rest of your bath cocktail - to create a mound of wonderful bubbles and a beautiful smell to accompany you in the bath. A small piece, about the size of an acorn would be suffice for a generous bath, which makes a big tub of this shower jelly better value for money than buying multiple individual bubble bars.
What I will say is great about Conga Shower Jelly is that the fragrance is completely brand new, making its debut in a format that I think compliments the smell really well. In fact, I would go as far as to say that I don’t think this particular scent would work all that well as a shower gel or soap, which is a rarity.
To my nose, the fragrance this shower jelly offers is a strong, fruity berry aroma: one that reminds me of raspberry yoghurt with a dash of lemon zest to make it brighter and slightly less yoghurt-like. The inclusion of the bergamot adds almost a green, delicate floral element that pads the smell of this out a little, and almost takes away the sharpness that you normally associate with the taste of raspberries.
This is a very playful, youthful smell and consumers who enjoy Lush’s more complex and intriguing aromas will probably not enjoy this all that much. However, for the warmer months that I hope to see during our British summer this year, Conga is a great shower jelly to have in your bathroom to complement the sunshine, and maybe perhaps even pre-frozen so you get a really refreshing boost when you next use it.
While this jelly works really well at lathering up; produces a beautiful foam to clean your skin with; and lingers on the skin and hair for a long time afterwards, the one thing I noticed about Conga was that it didn’t appear to be as moisturising as many of Lush’s previous jellies have been. Although there still appears to be the inclusion of carrageenan extract to make it nourishing for the body, my skin didn’t feel as smooth afterwards as I would normally expect. That’s not to say that it wasn’t softening at all; just that some of Lush’s recent jellies seem far more moisturising than this one.
Ultimately, I really enjoyed Conga as I really appreciated a brand new scent to sink my teeth into. While not the best fragrance that Lush have ever done, this is a wonderful summery jelly that’ll keep you uplifted and motivated during the warmer months of the year.
Quantitative Ingredients: Glycerine, Almond Milk, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Propylene Glycol, Carrageenan Extract, Perfume, Fresh Raspberry Juice, Bergamot Oil, Davana Oil, Almond essential oil, Vanilla Absolute, Water (Aqua), Titanium Dioxide, Alpha-Isomethyl Ionone, Benzyl Alcohol, *Coumarin, *Limonene, Colour 45410.
2019 Price: £11 for 240g.
Year Of Original Release: 2019.
No comments
Post a Comment