Allison Unfiltered: Emphasis on CLEAN. I promise.

A few weeks ago we were walking through a shopping mall on a very frustrating hunt for some size 1 white patent leather heeled shoes. How hard can those be to find? Seriously? And why, of all places, did we finally find them at SEARS?!

*ahem*

Anyway, we were walking through a shopping mall when we passed a store called Lush. I've never heard of this place before, but whenever I mention it to someone, their eyes pop open like I'm Santa Claus.

"You know that store Lush?"

"Ooooh! Ahhh! Whoa! Ohhhhh!"

"Oh, you do. Okay."

Well, there were some very friendly salespeople out front. When I say friendly, I mean one was sitting on a chair with her bare feet in some kind of water bath, and she called out to us and was all, like, yo! Come look around while I chill. Dude, this place is awesome!

Ohhkay.

So we decided to take a break from strangling each other over the White Shoe Search and walked in. Besides, it couldn't be that bad.

Handmade products! Freshly Made! Handwritten Signs! Minimal Packaging! Natural Ingredients! Vegan Products! Packaged and Marked with Expiration Dates! Environmentally Friendly! Unabashed abuse of Exclamation Points!

We were the only ones in the store, so we got our own little tour of all the products, and we were allowed to try everything. And almost nothing is in a bottle, so there's very little plastic in the store. The shampoo looks like bar soap. Actually, scratch that. Everything looks like bar soap.

Except for the face soap, which looks like a loaf of cheese waiting to be sliced for purchase. Which pretty much sold me. Anything that looks like cheese is my fwiend.

There were tubs of water in strategic spots around the shop, which was good, since we kept touching and rubbing and sniffing and stuff. It was like being a horny teenager in a sex shop, only clean. Really clean. Sudsy clean.

Our tour ended by this giant wall of bath bombs, which was a real score, because the salesperson we were with let us try like three bath bombs (and dude, for the cost of one bath, they're not cheap). Oh goodness. Leah thought it was fun, sure, to see a ball explode into bubbles and the water change colors and yummy smells bombard her nose... but it was stranger even to see mommy and daddy running back and forth between the bucket and the wall and throwing stuff in every chance we could get. Sex shop, I told you. But clean, dude, CLEAN!

So we left the store with way more loot than I needed. But now I'm in love with this and this. And especially this, which calms my dry frizzy hair down so much I'm starting to wonder if my fairy godmother really works for Lush.

As we were walking out, I stared longingly up at the sign for the store, sighed, and said, "I wish I worked there. I need to work there."

Sigh. Lush'd probably fire me after a week for inserting the word "orgasm" into every product description.

We also left with a honeybee bath bomb for Leah, which we sliced into half to prolong the enjoyment. And I had to share.

(FYI for deafies or people with the volume off: you hear the thud as I drop the ball in, and then the fizzing, big-time. Think Alka-Seltzer on steroids. And then if you can't figure out what Leah is saying, well... I feel sorry for you.)