Body Shop NZ has been put into voluntary liquidation. We reach out into the Dewberry mists of time to farewell some of our cruelty-free favs.  

Before Mecca was the mecca, before Sephora sold retinol to tweens and before the internet made beauty content a lucrative career path, there was The Body Shop. Anita Roddick, businesswoman, human rights campaigner and environmentalist, opened her first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. The first Body Shop store opened in New Zealand in 1989 on Lambton Quay in Wellington. 

Time marches on, and old favourites fall out of favour. As the Herald reported this week, Body Shop NZ has followed the same downward trajectory as its parent company internationally and has been put into voluntary liquidation. The stores remain open for now, but a spokesperson for the appointed voluntary administrators, Calibre Partners, told The Post, “We are working closely with the management team to develop a strategy to sell all stock and begin to wind down the business.”

At the height of its fruity power, with 28 stores open across the country, the unmistakable scents of Fuzzy Peach, White Musk and Dewberry stunk up malls, classrooms and changing rooms nationwide. The cruelty-free skincare, perfumes, soaps, body butter and cooling pink peppermint foot lotion became coveted products and popular default gifts for teenage birthdays, teachers and netball court MVPs. Opening a Body Shop lip balm pot and swiping it on with your pinky finger was as much of a status symbol in playgrounds and school corridors in the 90s and 2000s as Croc charms are now. To mark its sad demise, here are the Body Shop products that created the strongest memories for some Spinoff writers.  

Cooling Peppermint foot rescue

How powerful and evil and absurd is the beauty industry that, at roughly 10 years old, I became obsessed with the state of my feet. So much so that I have very vivid memories of nicking my mum’s Body Shop pungent cooling peppermint foot rescue cream and slathering it on my trotters like a maniac, terrified that if left unrescued (?) and uncooled (?) my feet would wither (?) and I wouldn’t ever get a boyfriend (?). Also: why did we want our feet to smell like peppermint, famously the aspirational smell of the mouth? Is that actually how foot and mouth disease got started back in the day? Makes you think. / Alex Casey

Born Lippy lip balms 

In my high school in India, far from any Body Shop outlet, anyone venturing near a mall in a major city was expecting to bring some Body Shop products back with them. When I was about twelve, a friend who had been to Delhi gave me a tiny tub of grape-flavoured Born Lippy gloss. I applied it relentlessly, wandering around with a faintly purple-tinged mouth for months on end. I was fascinated by the fold out list of ingredients on the back, and there was something exotic about the French translation of the product name being emblazoned on the front. “They don’t test on animals,” I told my mum, having read all the fine print. My mother had probably heard this numerous times at this point and was completely uninterested, but she did at least let me buy another tub of clear grapefruit Born Lippy a few years later. At school dances, I carefully dabbed it over my cheap lipstick so I could have extra shiny lips for dancing to Justin Bieber music in the school hall with all the lights off. / Shanti Mathias

Stainless steel blackhead extractor

I know this is really far away tonally from the mouth-watering body smoothie buzz for which The Body Shop is known, but I have very vivid memories of wandering confidently into the St Luke’s body shop in Auckland as an 11 year-old and buying what was essentially a stainless steel surgical tool for doing open heart surgery on your face. Raised on the images of Clean and Clear and instilled with bigtime Pore Panic, I used this little tool, basically a thin knitting needle with a sharp eyelet at the end, to squeeze out each and every blackhead on my pre-pubescent nose, while silently crying through the pain. I was so obsessed with this frankly illegal bit of kit that I tried to take it on a family holiday with us, but it got confiscated at border security because they thought it was a weapon. Happy memories. / AC

Avocado (and other) body butter

The body butters were the go-to for young girls who hated makeup but wanted in on the fruity energy. I had the driest lips and skin known to man as a child (I still do, actually) and knew even at eight years old that nothing The Body Shop had would be of any use to me. And yet I desperately wanted the smelly body butters. In the end, I used two across my childhood: shea (didn’t know what it was but liked the picture) and avocado (cursed). Both smelled delicious and sat on top of my crusty skin rather than being absorbed by it. I didn’t care, the ritual of scooping out the green avocado butter that eerily had the same texture as a smooth guacamole was the most important part. When it very quickly ran out I returned to my Eurecin moisturiser but the scent lives on in my memories. / Madeleine Chapman

Tea Tree Oil range

Ironically when I started using The Body Shop Tea Tree line I had not yet had my first pimple. Nevertheless, I still persisted in dousing my face in tea tree toner every morning (did not wash my face or moisturise, just toned??) and blotting my nose with the tea tree blotting paper. In later years I had hoped the pure tea tree oil would zap off blemishes – it did not, but it did burn and that felt like progress. I was also very impressed with the concept of tea tree foundation, although it did seem too good to be true. 10/10 marketing. / Sophie Dowson

The Body Shop gift basket

You could not swing a cat at a birthday party for high school or intermediate-aged young women and girls in the 90s without hitting a Body Shop gift basket. As you gathered around watching the birthday girl open presents, the cloying scent of The Body Shop’s Dewberry perfume spray trapped in your throat, there was always a moment where the size of The Body Shop gift basket was compared to others given or received that year. Shopping for them made you feel sophisticated and lavish as you gathered up as much of a matching set from one particular fruity scent line as possible — soap bars, bath oil beads, bath salts, mini fruit soaps, lip balms, shower gels, moisturisers and perfume sprays. You took your bundle to a special counter and watched as a clean-faced shop assistant artfully arranged it on top of the organic-looking shredded paper filler, expertly pulled a tight plastic wrapping over them and added a green ribbon bow with a flourish. Gathering and giving the complete set in Fuzzy Peach, Pink Grapefruit, Dewberry, or White Musk was a true marker of generous excess. /Anna Rawhiti-Connell

Peach Body Butter 

Before the Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum Cream, there was the peach body butter from The Body Shop – a true icon of my teenage years. Back then, my mall hot spots were Jay Jays, Just Jeans, and of course, The Body Shop. Stepping into the store was like entering a sensory wonderland; each corner had its own distinct scent – not overpowering, just perfectly inviting. It begged you to twist open one of those iconic circular pottles of body butter. Each pottle featured a stunning, lifelike image of the fruit it embodied, making you feel like you were shopping in the produce section of an artisanal market. The peach scent was my absolute favourite, and even now, I know one whiff would instantly transport me back to those days. /Jin Fellet

Summer reissue: New Zealand used to be a country of vibrant synthetic striped polyprop. Then we got boring – and discovered merino.

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It’s full of holes now, and getting saggy, but Emily Lane refuses to get rid of her favourite zip-up polyprop jumper. “I got it before I went overseas for my PhD, so it’s at least a quarter-century old,” she says fondly. “It’s falling to bits because I’ve had it so long.” 

She insists on keeping the decrepit garment because she can’t find anything that would aptly replace it. Browse any New Zealand outdoor retailer – and Lane has – and it’s basically impossible to find what she wants. She’s looking for narrow stripes, thoroughly synthetic fabric and, most importantly, garish colours. Blues and purples, greens and oranges, yellow and aquamarine. “It’s getting harder and harder in life to get stripy polypro – it’s all sombre colours,” she says. 

When Lane first started getting into outdoor adventures, at uni in the 90s, the stripes were everywhere. “I was a bit of a dirtbag in uni, and the polypro was the cheapest, but I would have chosen it anyway, the stripes are such awesome style,” says the Christchurch-based scientist and outdoor enthusiast. Ten or 15 years ago, stripy polyprop (also known as polypro) was ubiquitous around Aotearoa. Wintry school camps resembled a parade of gaudy zebras, weekend dog-walkers in the suburbs likely had blue stripes protruding from their jacket cuffs, and of course tramping huts featured people of all stripes – quite literally. 

I have memories of small snotty-nosed friends wearing head-to-toe stripy polyprop in all seasons in Auckland, slinging polyprop tops on the coat hooks in the middle of winter at my primary school, unwrapping new polyprop sets from aunties at Christmas. There are dozens of photos of me and my siblings wearing stripy polyprop in the chilly Indian mountains where we lived as children, although I tended to call it “prolypo” due to having some confusion around syllables.

It’s less obvious why the polyprop clothing was so stripy, specifically: after all, the colour has no impact on its function to keep you warm. “It kind of says ‘hey, I’m in the outdoors, I don’t have to be straitlaced’,” she says. Jean Mansill, a life member of the Auckland University Tramping Club, agrees. “In the 1990s, wearing [stripes] was part of having fun – now outdoor gear has gone from people who actually do stuff to tourists who want to look the part.” That most notorious of New Zealand looks – wearing rainbow polyprop under a t-shirt or shorts – has become a rarer sight in the hills.  

Browse Bivouac Outdoor, Kathmandu and Macpac, and the stripes are few and far between. Kathmandu sells a broad green and black stripe, Macpac has no stripes in its synthetic thermal layers at all, Bivouac sells some grey stripes but nothing else, the Warehouse has some pale blue and pink stripes. There’s nothing truly multi-coloured or zany. Nor is it reflected in tramping media: a flip through the latest Alpine Journal reveals a beautiful mediation on sexism in alpine sport and a project helping climbers and mana whenua engage meaningfully on the topic of what to do with human waste in the mountains, but no striped polyprop. The best place to get zany polyprop now seems to be StripesGear.com, a Canadian website which says its products (including the coveted mixed-stripe garments) are made in New Zealand – but shipping from Canada pushes the price of a single garment up to nearly $100.

“I still remember my first striped polypro – I might still have it,” reminisces Mansill. It was purple, pink and navy, and she wore the stripes through her first “snow school” trip in the early 1990s, learning mountaineering skills. She remembers being instructed on the merits of polyprop base layers, and told it was good to have at least two sets so that one could dry. Polyprop was light, dried fast, and – when she first encountered it – almost always stripy. She still wears some of her first polyprop sets – admittedly now with some holes – when sailing or biking, anywhere her clothes might be “hammered”.

What is polyprop? It’s short for “polypropylene” – the fibre has become shorthand for the garments made from it. Like other synthetic fabrics, polypropylene is a kind of plastic, made from oil. It might feel warm and fuzzy, but polyprop is the same material as any plastic labelled “5” on its resin codes to go in recycling. The colours are part of the plastic the thread is made from, rather than being dyed. Like other synthetics, polypropylene sheds microplastics – miniscule and featherlight fibres that are now so ubiquitous they’ve been found in drinking water, breastmilk, the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the Antarctic Ocean.  

Synthetic fabric became increasingly common in the second half of the 20th century – but for a long time, it wasn’t used to provided warmth. As we talk, Lane flips through some childhood photos: on her early adventures, she wore wool singlets and jumpers, not synthetic, bright polyprop. Through the 1980s, synthetic polar fleece fabric was developed from polyester, another plastic fibre. It gradually became widely available as a lighter replacement for wool. Polypropylene thermal layers made from stretchy knitted fabric were common by the 1990s, when Lane and Mansill started tramping. These fibres were part of a wholesale transformation of tramping gear, with light, synthetic, breathable equipment making outdoor activities more comfortable and new feats of exploration and endurance possible.

So why has polyprop and its funky stripes faded from popularity? Maybe it’s simply the market’s invisible hand: Wilderness Magazine editor Alistair Hall acknowledges that many people prefer solid colours, and he hasn’t seen stripy synthetics come across his desk for a product review for a while. “People are more conscious of colour – I get lots of feedback about that in the monthly gear reviews,” he says. Smartphones and shifting cultural forces made people more aware of how they looked when outdoors. “You used to have to work hard to get the boring [polyprop], now it’s all I find,” says Lane. 

Kathmandu, one-time purveyor of stripes galore, now experiences “huge demand” for black thermals, according to head of product Karinda Robinson. “Lots of our team have memories of wearing striped thermals on school camps in the 80s and 90s,” she says. “While lots of us love the stripe, the market in next-to-skin layers is evolving, with solid colours dominating as a more versatile choice.” 

Polyprop has downsides, too. There’s the microplastic shedding, for one, and, like all plastics, polyprop will take hundreds of years to fully degrade under natural conditions. It also tends to hold on to the smell from being worn close on people’s bodies. Lane has experienced the damp and sweaty polypro smell. “After a while it soaks in the stink.” More recently, the fabric has started being treated with antibacterial chemicals, which Hall says “means you can wear it for a couple of days without being a nuisance to your hut-mates.” 

But the main reason that base layers are less synthetic now is a four-legged New Zealand success story: the merino sheep. From upmarket brands like Untouched World selling plain merino shirts for hundreds of dollars, to more basic offerings at The Warehouse, fine, washable merino wool is as warm as polypropylene, and often only a little more expensive. It doesn’t shed microfibres, melt when it gets too close to a fire, get scratchy after a few washes or retain smells like polypro does. Merino doesn’t last as long, either, and is heavier, but there are ways around that. “That’s why so many people blend merino with synthetic fibres, because merino gets holes,” Hall says. 

Even polyprop superfans Lane and Mansill both wear merino for their outdoor adventures, as well as to commute on bikes and around the city. “My merino is more of a fashion statement – but polypro lasts longer,” Lane says. Mansill thinks the trends are related. “I haven’t seen many stripes since the merino revolution took over.”

There’s room for more “fun and outrageous” looks in the outdoors and the city alike, Mansill says – especially for something as iconically New Zealand as vibrant striped polyprop. Of course, those bright bands of colour could just as easily be made of merino: Icebreaker has some not-very-vibrant stripes (although not for base layers) and Mons Royale has stripy-armed layers and thermal leggings with colourful swirls. The latter even jabs at polyprop in its product description: “you can wave goodbye to the saggy, stinky, stuffy base layers and move the way you want to this winter”. 

Of course, that’s just what Big Merino wants you to think. Kathmandu’s Robinson offers some hope for the dedicated stripe base at least. She suggests that more tonal colours, with smaller stripes, might be due for a comeback, or colour-blocked garments with “bold and fun” mixes of solid colours. Lane, whose daughter has inherited her love of both stripy polyprop and outdoor adventures, wants to see the products become popular again. “There will always be a hardcore group who love stripy polypro.” 

First published July 8, 2024.