SWEET-smelling scents will be drifting down Worcester's High Street from today as handmade toiletries firm Lush opens its newest store.

The retailer offers a range of luxury beauty products for the face, hair and body, which are all handmade from fresh organic produce, plant extracts, herbs and essential oils.

Lush property manager Molly Morris said she saw Worcester as an ideal location to site the company's 46th UK outlet, its 193rd worldwide.

"It is an important retail area for the company. Worcester is a thriving area, steeped in history so we know it's a busy location both for tourists and everyday shoppers.

"We already have shops in nearby Birmingham and Cheltenham, so this is an ideal midway location."

The shop, at 103 High Street, will be staffed by 12 full and part-time assistants. Extra staff will be taken on during busy periods, like Christmas.

The Lush team began working together in the late 1970s and sold its first handmade cosmetics to the Body Shop in 1978.

Ten years later, it set up Cosmetics to Go in Poole, Dorset - a catalogue-based mail order cosmetics company, which eventually went under.

In 1994, the team picked itself up again as Lush and continued its ethos of using fresh organic products and a strict non-animal testing policy.

Since then it has gone from strength to strength, with wholly-owned shops as well as licensing and joint partnership agreements in Canada, America, Russia, Holland, Japan, Brazil and Australasia.

It is scheduled to open its first shop in Prague this month and one in Santiago, Chile, in August and still operates a mail order business.

The company describes itself as a "beauty deli" and its products include blocks of soap and shower gels frozen like ice cubes.