Last spring, one of my favourite brand tie-ins of 2023 saw high-street cosmetics chain Lush team up with Nintendo to create a range of products based around Super Mario. It was a riot of brightly coloured shower gels and super-sweet fragrances, including a divine Princess Peach body spray that I’m still using because screw gender-based perfume norms.
Now, Lush has released a new video game range celebrating 15 years of Minecraft. There are 12 items in the collection, including easily the most literal bath bomb Lush has ever made – a TNT block – as well as Grass and Lava blocks, a Creeper head shower bomb and a Diamond Pickaxe bubble bar, which is genuinely quite hefty despite its diminutive size.
The collection is apparently the result of a year-long collaboration with the game’s developer Mojang, and it’s been a popular project for the company’s employees. Lush concepts creative director Melody Morton is a regular player – and she’s not the only one. “We have many Minecraft players within the business, so there was lots of reference and resource to pull on when it came to products, creative and messaging,” says Kalem Brinkworth, the creative lead on the Lush collaborations team.
How much you’re going to want to try these will depend on your love of the game – and also the quite strong scents Lush is known for. “Choosing fragrances for products tends to be the final piece that brings it all together, so we all enjoy this bit,” says Brinkworth. “A few of the items had a clear, obvious fragrance direction, the Grass block bath bomb for instance – it needed to smell clean, fresh, green and, well, like grass. We developed a freshly-cut grass fragrance a while back and so this pairing was a given from the start.”
According to Brinkworth, some of the other items required trial and error with multiple fragrances. “We’ll look at the colour of the bath bomb, the properties of the item and determine the overall feeling we want to evoke – often that leads us to the perfectly matched fragrance.” The TNT bath bomb is an absolute explosion of ylang ylang and jasmine and it turns your bath a vibrant red, like wallowing in some sort of hippy horror film. By contrast, the Creeper block has a delicate lemongrass scent, which belies the creature’s sinister role in the game. The Totem of Undying is a soap bar with Brazilian orange and bergamot oils, which some might find sickly, but as a person who likes smelling like a Fruit Salad chew, I approve.
Lush isn’t alone in combining cosmetics and games: a couple of years ago, ColourPop Cosmetics had a great range of Animal Crossing: New Horizons makeup, while Fairy Tale Co launched a perfume based on the fighting game Guilty Gear. If you want to get really weird, Capcom has released several colognes based on its zombie horror series, Resident Evil – I have no idea what they smell like and honestly don’t want to know.
But what I think really works about this collection is the way they’ve thought about the form factor. Most of the collection is cube-shaped, so you can pile them up by the bath – and then you can hit them with the axe. There’s also a Lush Bath Bombs add-on for the Minecraft: Bedrock Edition available as a free downloadable via the Minecraft Marketplace. It lets you make your own bath bombs for use in the game. I could have really done with all this a few years ago when I was trying to get my young Minecraft-mad sons to have a bath. Other desperate parents should bear in mind, if they have children who want to smell like a Creeper or Ender Dragon, you’ll have to be quick as the set is only available until the end of August.
