BUBBLING OVER WITH IDEAS

ALL began over a stove. But when Claire Constantine recalls her childhood kitchen in Dorset, it's not the scent of home cooking she recalls, rather the smells of hot soap bubbling away in vats on the range. Equally memorable was heading down the garden to the shed to watch her mother, Mo, one of the six co-founders of beauty company Lush, experimenting with her latest scented concoctions.

- By Karen Rockett

Fresh fruit and veg were used for the cosmetics, creating the distinctive Lush smell.

Fast-forward 30 years and the company, rightly famous for its bath bombs, now has 886 shops in more than 50 countries and many of them will be gearing up for one of the busiest days of the year, ahead of Mother's Day tomorrow.

Claire, now 34, is Lush's global retail director. She never intended to go into the family business in Poole even though, as a child, she'd put on her pinny and help her mum mix up the lotions and potions.

"I wanted to go into politics. I wanted to be prime minister," she explains with a smile. "I did a couple of placements working for Liberal Democrat MPs in my gap year but I quickly realised I could have a much bigger impact on the issues I cared about within the company."

Impact is indeed the word to describe Lush's ethical credentials. Cooking up more than three decades worth of cruelty-free beauty products, it creates creams, soaps, shampoos, shower gels, lotions, moisturisers, scrubs, masks and other cosmetics, using only vegetarian recipes, 95% of which are vegan.

"When we started out, we all had a social conscience, we were all mostly vegetarians and we all cared about certain issues," explains Mo, 72, who remains a director of the business. "Anyone who works for us who has an idea, be it for a product or a campaign, can come forward and say so."

The open-door policy explains why Lush has been a driving force behind many high-profile social justice and environmental campaigns in recent times, some proving controversial, more of which to follow.