Lush Golden Wonder Ballistic: could this be the greastest ballistic ever made?

The other day I was killing time/getting my gossip fix/ stalking people on Facebook and was surprised to learn that a Lush store had reopened in Chatswood. I have been living in the area for seven years now and this is the third store that has opened in this time. Each time one closes I am a little heartbroken to be losing my local, and kept assuming that it was gone for good. Thankfully, Lush keep persevering to find the best set up for a store in Chatswood, this time around choosing an island in the middle of Westfield, rather than a traditional store. This is brilliant because all of Westfield is now fragranced with Eau de Lush!

I decided to pop in and check this new store out, especially the Christmas products. I had studied them in the catalogue but had not yet had a chance to play with any. The lovely sales assistant talked me into buying the Golden Wonder Ballistic. To be perfectly honest I wasn't expecting too much. As you can see from the pic below it is a boring yellow and white present shaped ballistic and I was expecting it to colour the water a glorious urine yellow. It is fragranced with champagne snow showers perfume, described as 'a light fizzing champagne cocktail, containing sweet orange oil, cognac oil and lime oil'. I do like this fragrance; however, I can't say that I was one of my all time favourites.



Image courtesy of Lush

You are probably wondering why I bought this ballistic if I didn't like the colour of it and only liked but not loved the fragrance. Well, if you shake the ballistic it rattles and I had to know what was inside. My money was on a little bell being the source of the rattle!

I always like to use the ballistics while I am actually in the bath to fully appreciate the fizzing and the exploding fragrance. So, for this reason there are no pics of the ballistic bubbling away in the bath. The beauty blogger in me was lying there thinking 'I really should be taking photos - this is amazing' but I wasn't going to do a dripping wet naked bolt through the house to get my iPhone so you will just have to make do with a written description!

My ballistic was obviously super fresh as it fizzed and bubbled like an exploding scientific experiment. Initially, there was just gold coming off (which was actually all that I was expecting) but then suddenly the water started turning green. I picked up the ballistic to see what was happening and it had turned from gold to a deep blue. In amongst the blue, out exploded hundreds of stars. I had just assumed that they were the foil stars that are often in Lush ballistics (the ones that keep poking you in the bottom as you lie there!), but it turns out that they were actually dissolving paper stars - even better as it meant no mess at the end. Now, if you don't want to know what the surprise in the middle is, here is your spoiler alert so skip to the next paragraph. As the blue continued to dissolve away out popped a sphere of pink ballistic - so there was a miniature ballistic inside the present and that was what caused the rattle.

The dark blue mixed with the initial gold turned the water a glorious deep turquoise. It really was a stunning colour to bath in. To my surprise, I absolutely adored the fragrance in ballistic format. In the past, I have just experienced the Champagne Snow Showers fragrance in jelly format, and I have to confess that I find the jellies a tad annoying to use, so that probably affected my opinion of it. It was a gorgeous refreshing fragrance - perfect for a summer's bath (though it is not quite summer yet, when the weather tops 36 degrees, that counts as summer!). The fragrance is lovely and strong - you can detect it for the entire bath. It is definitely not one of those ballistics that, after five minutes, you wonder if you are actually just bathing in plain water. The fragrance lingered delicately on the skin for a little while afterwards. Another surprise was that my skin had a subtle gold shimmer all over it. I hadn't realised but the gold colour I initially saw when the ballistic hit the water was actually a very fine gold shimmer. It is not an in your face glitter, but a subtle sexy gold shimmer. Gorgeous!

This ballistic has now jumped the queue to become my favourite ballistic. It wasn't at all what I was expecting and I really enjoyed using it. I shall be stocking up on a few more to last me through summer, then, one the Christmas stock is no longer available, I shall begin petitioning Lush to make sure they bring it back again next Christmas!

Have you tried Golden Wonder yet? What were your thoughts? What is your favourite Lush ballistic?