Review: Lush Love and Light Hand Cream

I love hand creams, I seem to have about five or six of them most of the time, and am on a quest to find the perfect one. In the Boxing Day sales I bought a couple of Lush gift sets, this Love and Light Hand Cream was in one of them which is why it’s a smaller tub. You can find the Love and Light Hand Cream in Lush stores or in their online store for £7.95 for 100g or £13.95 for 220g.

They do a range of hand creams and I have found them fairly successful in the past, though they did discontinue my favourite Smitten a while ago. This one is fairly strongly scented, it has the scent of the Orange Blossom perfume and the other products in that range.

I seem to have a bit of a love hate relationship with Lush black pots. They’re nice and strong, good for the environment and do keep closed when travelling (at least in my experience) so they’re good in those ways. However it seems like if you have any kind of cream then it will somehow make its way up into the thread of the lid and make it quite messy when it comes to opening and closing it and the cream will thicken in there and get a bit odd looking. This isn’t a big deal if you keep it tidy but it does mean I find myself wiping the thread clean quite often so it closes well and that means I’m losing quite a bit of the product over time.

The design of the labels is nice, it’s a very minimalist look with black and white and very little information. The larger pots do include things like the ingredients, often a spotlight on one of them in particular, and instructions on how to use it. It’s the kind of pot that I would happily have out in the bathroom and I don’t think it would look out of place in any as it’s got a simple design but the font of the product name itself is like it’s been brushed on.

The product itself is pretty thick, which I do like in a hand cream. You really don’t need much, the amount I got out in the photo was more than enough for both hands and went half way up to my elbows as well. It sinks in pretty well but does need five or ten minutes before you can do anything too fiddly as your hands stay greasy for a bit and you can leave fingerprints everywhere. I do use this throughout the day as it is moisturising and it isn’t too long to wait really.

The scent for this is slightly odd to me. It is very strong, it’s definitely the orange blossom scent, very floral and quite sharp and it lingers for a long time. For some reason it seems to almost turn into a bonfire type smell on my hands after a few minutes, especially on my fingers. I don’t know what does that and it’s not an unpleasant smell, just different to how it starts.

Overall I would say this is a decent hand cream but not that impressive. The main draw for this one in particular would be the scent, if you love orange blossom scents then this might be worth looking at but it’s not a product type that I tend to want to smell like a perfume. I will be using this, it does seem to work for my skin, but it’s definitely not one I would be repurchasing because it’s not that amazing for the price. If the scent was different I might be tempted, although I don’t particularly want overly scented hand creams if they had one in another of their scents, like the Comforter or the Love range, then I might as it could work well as a very subtle perfume. As it is I’d choose Soap and Glory, Burt’s Bees or even L’Occitane over these for the actual benefits of the cream itself without one of their scents that I love.

I think that this might be a nice gift if you know someone who likes these types of scents as it is a good cream and something a bit different, though you do have to know that this scent in particular is one they’ll like as it’s not one of those generic everyone will like this scents where it doesn’t often get a strong negative reaction. Lush products are cruelty free and this hand cream is vegan so that’s good if you are yourself or you want to get a gift for someone who is.