Lush's Next Big Thing: The Unicorn Horn #TheyDoExist

Every Season at Lush it would seem that a front runner emerges from the pack of limited edition seasonal products, and leads the way forward for sales target smashing and selling out left-right and centre. For Christmas, is was obviously the returning favourite Snow Fairy. 

For Valentines, the award looks like it’s going to... The Unicorn Horn.

At £3.25 each, The Unicorn Horn bubble bar looks like a slightly elongated version of the Christmas favourite runner-up Candy Mountain; think slightly longer and slightly pointier.
Crumble this bad boy up under hot running water and Lush promises a “magical bath filled with beautiful neroli and lavender essential oils, colourful candy stars, sparkling lustre, rainbows and dreams.” – What else would you expect from a dissolvable Unicorn Horn?

The lustre featured on the horn (?!) is very similar to the fine shimmer that covered The Candy Mountain, but the scent is far more similar to the treasured all-year-long product the Twilight Bath Bomb. If Lush Cocktailing takes your fancy, I would definitely recommend using a Twilight bath bomb along with the Unicorn Horn; as Twilight dissolves your water will transform from a pearlescent pink to a moody, shimmering deep purple night sky.
With added lustre from the bubble bar there will be a million stars in your sky tonight. The endless amount of bubbles that come from the valentine’s edition Bubble Bar is surprising, so I would suggest if you do decide to get some cocktails going you cut your horn down.

Both products heavily feature Lavender which is the perfect soothing, mind-clearing and relaxing fragrance to soothe you into your evening – I’ve never slept better after an hour in the bath with these two and then off to bed.  Whilst Twilight has quite a floral, romantic Lavender scent to it, it’s complimented (not copied) by The Unicorn Horn which Lavender is more herbal but equally as enchanting.

But why is The Unicorn Horn so popular, you ask? Well, it’s beautiful for one. The second reason is that most of the noted reviewers on YouTube received one in their press samples and as you can tell from this sample image; it was very well received. (Sprinkle of Glitter permitted the internetty circulation of this particular image.)

The popularity of some Lush products astounds me – similarly to Snow Fairy at Christmas, there was also Northern Lights just before and Sparkler before that. All of the afore mentioned products sold so well that every time we emptied one box onto the shelf, we needed to open another – the never ending replenishment of Snow Fairy did not teach me however, that I would grow to like the scent (love the scent) and now in February, I look at the sliver of Snow Fairy left in my 100g bottle and I curse myself for not seeing this coming; for not buying more when I had the chance. I completely understand the obsession with favourite products.

With ten days to go until Valentines, and realistically only eleven days of possible Unicorn Horn buying time, I recommend you go now – go forth Lushies and stock up those haul cupboards. I certainly will be.

How To - Best Bloody Mary's Ever.

How to make the best Bloody Mary you’ll ever have. 

So, everyone knows that a good Bloody Mary is the perfect way to slide into an evening session or maybe even a cheeky pick me up in the afternoon. Either way, there are do’s-and-don’ts.

This is the way I’ve been taught to make a Bloody Mary, with my own preferences thrown in too.

You will need to acquire the following;

-          One bottle of the regular, normal old tomato juice. Britvic or Schweppes is fine, Big Tom is not. Big Tom is already spiced so you don’t really want to use that one if you’re into tailoring your own drink. Also, if you use Big Tom it will make everything I’m about to say entirely irrelevant.

-          A double, or  50ml’s, of regular vodka. Smirnoff,  Absolut ...whatever floats your boat.

-          A ‘little’ splash of Tabasco sauce.

-          A generous splash of Lea & PerrinsWorcestershire Sauce.

-          A sprinkle of Celery Salt, which you can by in the spice section of most full-size supermarkets. By full-size, I mean not a Tesco Metro. You need a proper big boy supermarket.

-          Ice

-          Lemon slice.

-          Celery stick (if you want)

1.       Combine all ingredients except juice and lemon into your glass. Stir.

2.       Pour half of your juice into your glass. Stir.

3.       Fill your glass with juice, stir and add in your lemon.

4.       Slide your celery stick in as an edible-stirer.

5.       Enjoy.

For those who don’t want ice in their juice, try this version. This is the version I make at the bar, or if I’m not being lazy. Me? Lazy? Ahem.

1.    Pour ice, vodka, celery salt, Lea & Perrins and Tabasco into a pint glass.

2.   Pour mixture into another pint glass, and then back again into the original. 

3.   Pour half of your tomato juice into the mixture (still in a pint glass).

4.   Repeat step two.

5.   Add remaining tomato juice.

6.    Repeat step two.

7.    Strain and serve into a half-pint glass, garnish with celery and or lemon.  Your Bloody Mary will be chilled from the ice in the pint glasses and will not have dissolving cubes floating about in it.

8.     Enjoy.

If you would prefer a Virgin Mary, simply follow steps 1 through 8, but don’t add the Vodka at the start. Et voila – the perfect brunch juice drink for your friends on Saturday morning.

If you'd like more recipes for cocktails and things of the like, BBC Online has some good ones, or if you want something a little sexier and daring try out the cocktails on Esquire, who are doing awesome Whiskey Cocktails for Fall at the moment. (which is Autumn to us Brits.) 

Hope you have enjoyed this how-to. I’ve quite enjoyed making it, so maybe there’ll be more of this kind of thing going on. Let me know if you do like this, if you don’t, if you like Bloody Mary’s, if you don’t. Yadda yadda yadda.