Review: Lush BB Seaweed Fresh Face Mask

On my quest to try all of Lush's Fresh Face Masks, my most recent purchase is BB Seaweed, a mask designed to soften, cleanse and hydrate skin. I've tried three of Lush's masks already and I wasn't quite sure which one to try next but the salesgirl suggested this one, so I gave it a go!

BB Seaweed contains honey (antibacterial and a humectant, which means it traps and holds moisture against the skin), lime tree flower and sweet violet leaf decoction (soothing and cleansing), kaolin (exfoliating and deep cleansing), fresh rose petals (toning and soothes redness), aloe vera (soothing) and, of course, seaweed (softening and hydrating). It also has exfoliating millet seeds in it, so the mask is a bit scrubby, but not as much so as, say, the Love Lettuce mask. The seeds are finely milled, so there's no sharp edges that could tear or drag across your face.

When you put the mask on, it immediately feels very cooling and while you're wearing it, it's pretty gentle on the skin. There's no tingly feeling to it or anything like that, which makes sense, as one of the things this mask is meant to do is help with skin redness, so you don't want to have anything in it that could feel too intense or potentially irritating.

I must confess that, at first, was kind of "meh" on BB Seaweed. There are other masks that I feel do more for me and are better suited for my oily skin--Cupcake and Catstrophe Cosmetic come to mind--but this is a mask I would probably like more during the wintertime, since it has hydrating, softening and anti-redness properties. In summertime, I'm mostly concerned with fighting grease and warding off blemishes. But one thing I've found BB Seaweed works great for in the summer is helping soothe sunburn! My boyfriend took me to a water park earlier this week and we had a blast, but when we got home, my cheeks and my nose began to feel hot and I could see the telltale redness coming on.

I remembered that seaweed is supposed to help quench your skin with minerals and hydration, making it a good post-sunburn pick-me-up, plus BB Seaweed has aloe vera in it, which is great for soothing burns. So I slapped on a BB Seaweed mask and it gave me some fast relief from the burning and redness. The redness was still there the next day (to be expected), but the burning went away completely within a few minutes of washing the mask off, which is pretty impressive, and my face felt comfortable for the rest of the day.

A single pot costs $6.95 and you can get about six to eight masks per pot, depending on how thickly you apply them, so it really is a great value. The masks need to be refrigerated because they contain fresh ingredients with no preservatives, so the only place you can buy them is in-store. The masks have a shelf life of three weeks, but personally I just treat them like food: So long as you store them properly and check for changes in scent and consistency, you can get away with using them a bit longer than the official shelf life.