Lush turns Liverpool schoolgirl’s Northern Lights idea into new bath bomb

Lola’s Northern Lights idea did not stay on paper for long. Lush has turned the Liverpool schoolgirl’s concept into Lola’s Aurora Borealis bath bomb, keeping the glow-at-night-sky theme but refining it into a finished product with a new name, a polished scent and a custom-made pressing tool.

The company said Lola submitted the design through the Lush Times Design Your Own Bath Bomb page, then travelled with her family to Poole to watch the product come together and meet the people behind it. Ruby West, Lush’s Bathing Category Lead, tied the launch back to Liverpool’s community, while Lola said she felt proud that Lush was actually using something she had designed and enjoyed seeing the colours, smells and tools used to make it.

The final bath bomb leans into the Aurora Borealis brief with a fresh, uplifting fragrance built by in-house perfumer Emma Vincent. Lush lists eucalyptus, bergamot, pine needle absolute, peppermint oil and light ozonic notes, a mix meant to suggest a bright sky rather than a candy-sweet soak. Product inventors also built a bespoke pressing tool to translate Lola’s drawings into the swirl pattern that ended up on the shelf.

The release lands with the kind of heritage story Lush likes to tell around its core category. The company says bath bombs were first invented by co-founder and manufacturing director Mo Constantine in 1989, when the original version was pressed in her garden shed in Dorset. Lush says it was first awarded the bath bomb trademark on 27 April 1990, a date it now marks as World Bath Bomb Day.

That history matters because Lush is not treating this as a novelty side project. The company says it has created more than 500 bath bomb designs and sold more than 350 million bath bombs globally, so a child-designed launch still fits inside one of its biggest and most recognizable product lines. Lush also says bath bombs are handmade by compounders, not machines, which keeps the product close to the original process even as the shapes, scents and stories have multiplied.

Lola’s Aurora Borealis reached UK anchor stores in Glasgow, Liverpool and London Oxford Street on 21 April, with an online and wider UK rollout set for 23 April. Liverpool gives the launch an especially neat loop, since Lush describes Lush Spa Liverpool as its biggest store in the world, spread over four floors and built around bespoke experiences.