Our Ethical Buying Policy

At Lush we pride ourselves on our creativity, and this doesn’t stop with our products. Since the beginning our aim has been to use the best, safest and most beautiful ingredients.

We’ve discovered that if you want the best ingredients, you have to go out and find them yourself in the wider world. Our dedicated Buying team works tirelessly to ensure that's what we get. Often this involves a great deal of creative thinking and finding solutions to problems, such as sourcing the finest essential oils and absolutes, the best natural raw materials, safe synthetics, 100% recycled packaging or removing palm oil from our products. We have a strong commitment to the communities and areas from which we buy our ingredients.

We feel that our ingredients should be bought in a respectful way that safeguards the environment and provides a positive social impact. We support fair trade and community trade initiatives. We find out what impact our buying has on people and environment and make responsible decisions regarding from where, from whom and how we purchase ingredients and packaging for Lush.

Ethical Considerations when buying

• Workers’ rights - unions, collective bargaining, health and safety, freedom to leave, fair pay, working hours, discrimination, no child labor.

• Environment - organic, sustainability, endangered species, production emissions onto land and water, use of resources to process ingredients, no genetic modification.

• Animal protection - no animal testing of ingredients, vegetarian ingredients only.

• Transport - the distance ingredients travel, minimizing air freight, packaging materials used.

We buy…

• 1/6th of the world’s harvest of orange flower absolute from small orange groves in Tunisia

• 1/8th of the world’s neroli oil, hand-harvested from the bitter orange trees of Tunisia

• 1/10th the worlds crop of Turkish rose absolute, gathered by the nomadic Roma people

• 5 villages’ worth of benzoin resin from the inaccessible climbs of Northern Laos

• Fair trade shea butter, supporting 400 women in remote areas of Ghana

• 60 tons of organic, fair trade cocoa butter from Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic

• Nearly 1/5th of the UK’s henna imports, totalling 55 tons

• One island in the South Pacific’s worth of sandalwood oil it’s sustainably felled by the indigenous Kanak tribesmen.

• 1/3rd of Hungary’s entire crop of their best blue chamomile oil

• 150 bunches of flowers a week or about 8,000 bunches a year for use in our fresh products.

• 27 tons of organic fruit a year and 55 tons of fresh fruit and veg a year, both organic and conventional, locally-sourced weather permitting

• We have stopped using approximately 250 tonnes of palm oil in an effort to save the Orangutan and its threatened habitat in Indonesia’s rainforests.