Sheer Luxury Organza Christmas Gift Bags

During the weekend, I uploaded images of our two new Christmas Gift bags - Festive Orange Spice & Christmas Glisten - to the website.  I thought you might like to hear about them. 

They comprise of one luxury handcrafted goatsmilk & glycerine soap, one Sheer Luxury Body Butter and one Sheer Luxury Body Polish sugar scrub, all beautifully presented in a colour co-ordinated organza gift bag with satin ribbon ties.

Festive Orange Spice is a strong, rich dark and spicy orange and cinnamon blend, very cosy and heartwarming. It is a very traditionally Christmassy fragrance blend that works really well for bath and body products; a perfect Wintery scent that will leave your skin beautifully fragranced.

Christmas Glisten is a cosy blend of festive fruits, wine and sweet warm spices. It is a beautiful Christmassy blend, softly spiced with a warm fruity background, that leaves your skin beautifully fragranced.

Product Descriptions (so you know what you're buying!):
Luxury Handcrafted Goatsmilk & Glycerine Soap - with added Shea Butter & our Ecocert skin conditioner, this soap will leave your skin wonderfully clean, soft and beautifully fragranced; coloured using natural mica, this soap softly glistens.

Sheer Luxury Body Polish - a new addition to the Sheer Luxury range, this sugar scrub is crammed full of exotic Macadamia Butter & Coconut Oil along with unrefined golden brown sugar crystals to help remove any dead and dry skin, leaving your skin feeling soft, glowing and beautifully moisturised. This is designed to wash off in the shower after use. Best followed by our Sheer Luxury Body Butter.

Instructions for use: After showering (using your luxury handcrafted soap), scoop out a handful of the scrub and, using circular motions, gently scrub any dry skin from your body. Don't use on the face or any tender areas including broken skin. Suitable for use up to 2 - 3 times a week.

Sheer Luxury Body Butter - with luxury Shea Butter, Coconut Oil & Rice Bran Oil, this whipped body butter is a deeply intensive moisturiser made with 100% of our pure quality oils and butters; you need only a small amount to have the softest skin ever. The butters and oils are specifically chosen for their ability to condition, soften and protect your skin.

Instructions for Use: Apply all over the body (avoiding the facial area) and allow 10 minutes prior to dressing, to allow the product to soak completely into your skin; can also be used a hand/cutical cream. A little goes a long way.

Note: None of these products are designed for use on your face, so please ensure you avoid this area. Do not use on broken skin. Our Body Polish may leave the bottom of your shower/bath slippery so please exercise caution. Avoid getting any water into your body polish jar in use/storage as this can affect the effectiveness of the scrub.  

Minimum Weights/Capacity: Soap 120g, Body Butter 100mls, Body Polish 200mls

You can purchase these fabulous gift bags exclusively online for only €23 (excl. P+P) - just click this Christmassy link!

Soaperstar - Made in Ireland Feature in No. 1 Magazine!

The weather is blowing a gale outside, the rain is lashing against the windows, it's pitch black and yet I'm smiling! Why? Because an envelope dropped through the door this morning with a copy of the November issue of No. 1 magazine who featured Soaperstar's fabulous new Sheer Luxury Lip Butters in their Made in Ireland article. 

It's great to have a mention in nationwide press and have our products listed as one of their "Must Have's".  No. 1 magazine is published in Cork and is billed as Ireland's No. 1 health and beauty magazine. 

If you'd like to purchase our Sheer Luxury Lip Butters or any of our products, please check out our online store at http://www.soaperstar.com/ - fabulous new Christmas Gift Bags on sale now!

New Soaperstar Products - available on site now

We've introduced new products on site today!

Our Vanilla Bean Sheer Luxury Body Butter blends the best quality Shea butter, Coconut Oil and Rice Bran Oil with a sweet, creamy rich vanilla fragrance. The fragrance will softly linger on your skin during the day - you'll smell so sweet and delicious!

The butters and oils used have been chosen as they nourish, protect and hydrate your skin.

Texture:
This is a whipped body butter that will melt immediately on contact with your skin. Take a little on your fingertips and rub into your hands before applying to the rest of your body.

Directions for Use:

• 
  
  Apply all over the body as often as desired
• Gives you delicately scented and highly nourished skin
• Best used after a bath or shower to help trap the moisture into your skin (allow 10 minutes before dressing)
• Excellent for use on your feet
• Excellent for use on dry, sensitive skin but can be used by all skin types very successfully
• Designed to soak into your skin quickly & easily
• Perfect for use as a hand and cuticle cream
• Not recommended for use on your face

We've also introduced our new Sheer Luxury Lip Butters too - we've blended pure Virgin Organic Cocoa Butter with exotic Kokum Butter, skin loving Jojoba Oil and Meadowfoam Oil to make the best lip butter you will ever try! This creates a wonderful sheen on your lips, whilst moisturising and conditioning them at the same time.

Key Ingredients:

• Virgin Organic Unrefined Cocoa Butter - rich, creamy & smooth & smells deeply of chocolate, this butter moisturises, soothes and protects providing a natural source of Vitamin E
• Kokum Butter - excellent for chapped skin, this creamy butter helps reduce the degeneration of skin cells whilst restoring elasticity
• Jojoba Oil - has an unique ability to penetrate the upper layer of skin, this oil is particularly good for chapped lips.
• Meadowfoam Oil - has high emoollient properties and helps promote healthy skin tissue; excellent for dry, cracked and sore lips

Our Sheer Luxury Lip Butter comes in a variety of flavours:

Pure Peppermint - pure Peppermint Essential Oil gives a minty fresh zing to your lips, feel the minty tingle!

Pure Coconut - sweet Coconut with a creamy vanilla base, delicious.
Lemon & Tangerine - a blend of pure Lemon & Tangerine essential oils, giving a zesty zing to your lips.

All our new products are available on our site now - treat yourself to some Sheer Luxury today! http://www.soaperstar.com/

We're all going on a Summer Holiday, no more working for a week or two... or three!

Hi everyone! Sorry, I've been sort of quiet on here lately but the Soaperstar empire has been mega busy of late! I've been working to make up lots of batches of our wholesale soap to have in stock because... we're off for our Summer break!

This has been an exciting but tough year so far - working, to what amounts to two full time jobs, is tiring but I'm loving it so much... Soaperstar is just what I wanted it to be and I'm so enjoying the reactions of all my customers, we've gotten some really fabulous feedback and reviews and we've been spotted by celebrities!!! 

And, as a sneaky hint, we're introducing some new products in September/October so you will see why I've been so quiet.

So I just wanted to give you the heads up that we're taking some time off this Summer so all orders placed on or before midnight on Thursday 29 July will be posted on Friday 30 July - any orders placed after midnight on 29th will be posted from Monday 23 August onwards ... so if you need to order for your own hols, do it soon! All our handcrafted luxury goatsmilk and glycerine soaps and our Sheer Luxury Body Butters are exclusively available from our online store at http://www.soaperstar.com. 

  

Sun, sand, sea and whatever takes your fancy, here we come!!!

New Body Butters from Soaperstar

Hi everyone... sorry I've been so lax about writing to the blog but I've just been up to my eyeballs and beyond with everything lately.  As you know I also work full-time and that job has times when it's extremely stressful, the last 2 months being one of those times.  On top of that, you may know that I am involved in a collaborative venture with some women friends, all of whom run their own businesses and have worked to get our Facebook and Twitter accounts up and running and, in the last week, set up a forum for people to join (if you're interested in joining, the link is http://www.creationcollaboration.myfastforum.org/).

Anyway, despite all that and some family issues, I spent last weekend making lots of body butters and I wanted to show you here. I've also redesigned my labels and I think they are clearer and fresher and, most importantly, more professional looking.  I've also redesigned my soap labels to match with these but they're not quite at final sign off stage as yet. 

So - to the Body Butters!

Geranium & Lavender - Essential Oil Blend

Citrus Sunshine - with a blend of Tangerine, Mandarin & May Chang Essential Oils

Summer Sunflower - a wonderfully summery fragrance

Raspberry Blonde - a sweet deep blend of juicy Raspberries & soft Vanilla

Sandalwood & Vetiver - deep sensual woody blend of fragrance, very unisex

I love each of them and I really enjoyed making them - I am moving towards developing my range into specific fragrance groups and these are the start towards that. Each of these butters contains Shea Butter and Coconut Oil and the Citrus Sunshine, Raspberry Blonde and Geranium & Lavender all contain exotic Illippe Butter.  For details on each of these butters including the benefits they give to your skin, check out our website. 

I really hope you enjoyed seeing these and sorry again for having been so quite lately.  If you're interested in purchasing any of this butters or any of our luxury handcrafted goatsmilk & glycerine soaps, then check out our website at http://www.soaperstar.com/ - you can join our Fan Page on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/soaperstar or you can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/soaperstar.

The Silver Fox!

Well Mr Soaperstar and I had a talk last night and it turns out he'd love to get involved in Soaperstar much more than he does already (when you get a package delivered, he's the one that drops it to the Post Office!). 

So we decided that today, I'd train him in! We decided to jump right in and make a Body Butter together - this is designed to be anti-heat ... as our Body Butters are 100% butters/oils, obviously, in hot weather, they will tend to melt a little.  So, we've added a higher level of harder butters to reduce the "melty" effect (yes, that's a technical term!).

We decided to work with blend of Shea, Mango and Cocoa Butters along with Olive & Sunflower Seed oils as they are soooooo good for your skin.  Mr Soaperstar worked to the recipe perfectly and, under minimal instructions from me, made a perfect body butter... he choose a blend of Lime, Litsea, Orange Blossom on a woody/musky base to fragrance it (it's a beautiful, a perfect unisex, Summer scent). 

The base butter was a creamy colour but he wanted to colour it with a tinch of purple mica but that sort of turned it silver instead so we choose to call it The Silver Fox! It's very appropriate for Mr Soaperstar as he's a little bit of a silver fox himself! Hope you like the pictures and the story - I have to say it's a really excellent butter and it just smells fabulous!

Excellent Reviews for our Sheer Luxury Body Butter

Since their lauch on 1 April, our Sheer Luxury Body Butters have really gone down a treat with our customers.  I've received two absolutely fabulous reviews of them and our luxury handcrafted soap and thought I'd share them with you here.

Sinead recently ordered one of our very new (not yet even released!) Body Butters and said "I received my new Zesty Citrus Cream soap yesterday which smells fab and can't wait to open it (I know it will be amazing, the soaps always are!) but had to share about the bodybutter - I was sent an exclusive - Summer Sunflowers!! Opened it and the smell - pure sunshine - but it gets better, normally body butters are kind of thick? This is like a mousse - goes on the skin and becomes like a body oil that feels amazing and soaks right in! I'm converted totally and recommend this product to anyone - friends are sorted now with presents for ever! Well done Celine on an amazing product!!".  

And Felicity messaged me on Facebook to say "Hi Celine, I just wanted to post up about the products I received from you this week....the package was so beautifully wrapped that I took it into work to show the girls before I defaced it with my scissors. Well the excitement of the wrapping alone was tremendous and then came the two body butters that I ordered. The girls went mad for the citrus scented option and immediately wanted to try both out. they loved it, I loved it and I had to give up the business card and the little sticker on the front of the box so that they would know how to contact you. I am looking forward to my yummy hot bubble bath this evening where I will be doing eeeney meeeny miney mo on which option to smother myself in when I get out. To a job well done on both a professional as well as a fun level, I give you a big thumbs up. PS - Your packaging and branding is just excellent."

I was blown away by these reviews and wanted to thank both girls for taking the time to tell me how much they love the products! I really appreciate - feedback like this makes all the months of research so worth it!

Oddly enough, both girls are florists so know a thing or two about fabulous fragrances and excellent design!

If you'd like to check out our Sheer Luxury Body Butter selection (new fragrances being added next week, including the Summer Sunflowers) then check out our website at http://www.soaperstar.com/ - we also carry a wide range of luxury handcrafted goatsmilk & glycerine soaps.  

Soaperstar Press Coverage on Beautycouture.ie

I came home today to a fabulous email from the lovely Niamh from Beauty Couture.ie to say that they featured Soaperstar today!

Beautycouture.ie is Ireland's newest and brightest online magazine and is the place to get your daily dose of celebrity gossip, beauty and fashion news, plus totally yummy recipes, the hottest social pics, the best interviews and more fabulous competitions than you can shake a bejewelled stick at.

You can read the Soaperstar article here - thanks Beautycouture.ie, you made my day!!!

Remember, if you too want be couture and treat yourself to some luxury handcrafted soap and body butters, check us out at our online store today!

Soaperstar is Creation|Collaboration's First "Friday Feature"

I'm chuffed that Soaperstar has been the first "Friday Feature" for the new Creation|Collaboration blog... please check out the fab new blog post here!

Welcome to our First Women Wednesday Blog Roll!

Welcome to Creation|Collaboration's 1st Women Wednesday blog roll, hosted by Beads & More by Lois, Soaperstar and Plans and Presents.

Creation|Collaboration was set up by eight women, all existing friends, who run small businesses from their homes. We have started Women Wednesday blog roll to link up with other women in business, spread the word about Creation|Collaboration and basically just have fun visiting all of your interesting blogs!

We are also in discussions with regard to listing features companies (on a regular basis) as part of our promotional campaign so by joining in with the blog roll we can get to know you and your business and maybe you could be one of our first features.

Heres how you can join in with Collaboration Women Wednesday:

• Link up your blog name and URL using the McKLinky below (you only need to add on one blog to be seen on all of the McKLinky blog roll's)
• Follow our Creation|Collaboration blog and the hostesses listed in the first 3 slots.
• Grab our Women Wednesday button in your blog post.
• Follow and comment saying you're from Women Wednesday on as many blogs as you likes listed in the McKlinky box.
• Follow back any new followers from Women Wednesday.

It's that easy and a fun way to discover new and interesting blogs and us women at Creation|Collaboration get to meet other women in business!

Soaperstar Wins!

Well, I got home yesterday evening after a long hard day, and jumped online to check my emails ... and what did I find in my inbox? A fabulous email! Yes! But fabulous how? Fabulous because I'd just been told that I've won the Mr Site Website of the Month!! I was thrilled, such good news. 

And, even better news... they've also asked to use my site on their sample pages, to show people how a Mr Site website can look! I am really honoured about this ... when I started out, I didn't have any idea at all how to make a website, what information I'd need, or even what to do about those funny websitey languages?? But I did know I wanted to make it myself, I knew how I wanted it to look and I wanted to be able to update it myself, whenever I needed to. 

For those who don't know, Mr Site is a template driven site ... you choose a template that you like and you can input your own content on it; but you can also change almost every aspect of it to make it your own (because who wants a website that looks like everyone else's?!) and, if you learn a little HTML coding, you can certainly change a lot of the format of it.  The content is all down to you of course!!

Mr Site publish a monthly newsletter and Soaperstar will be featured in this - can't wait to see it!

Don't forget, if you like any of our fabulous Soaperstar products, check out our Soaperstar Online Store - we'll be delighted to see you!!!

Mmmm Summer sunshine... Pineapple Beach anyone?

With the hope of some fabulous Summer sun, I've added to my Summer range by making a fabulous new fruity, delicious soap - Pineapple Beach another of our luxury handcrafted goatsmilk and glycerine soaps.

To keep with the tropical theme, I've added pure Organic Coconut Oil, which has been called the healthiest oil on earth - it has incredible abilities to moisturise your skin and is particularly good with dry or mature skin.

To increase moisturisation and to give you even more fabulously soft skin, I've also added my usual skin hydrating Ecocert additive - you'll know by now this is a vital ingredient in all my soaps as it adds yet another vital luxury element.

This summery soap is fragranced with a delicious, fresh, sweet & juicy pineapple scent - for a real tropical Summer! And I've used a blend of two different natural micas, specially imported from the US, to create a true juicy pineapple colour. These micas glisten gently in this wonderful soap - perfect for those warm Summer days!

If you are interested in purchasing this truly Summery soap, check out our Soaperstar Online Store - we'll be happy to see you there!!

Soaperstar Launch our new Sheer Luxury Body Butters!!!

Today we are delighted to announce the launch of our new Sheer Luxury Body Butters!

Our new Body Butters are lightly whipped to create a soft and creamy butter that glides onto your skin, giving you that silky sensual feel whilst gently fragrancing your skin. 

We use a blend of the highest quality Shea Butter, Organic Coconut Oil and a mix of both Cocoa Butters - the creamy white coloured version plus the dark unrefined organic version (a chunk of which smells exactly like pure chocolate!).

We add oils and whip carefully in order to create a light, airy, creamy butter that will hydrate, soften and protect your skin. 

So what is different about Soaperstar Sheer Luxury Body Butters? They contain 100% butters/oils which give you 100% protection, hydration and softness and treat your skin to the total luxury it deserves!

There are several fragrances available including some using natural Essential Oils .. check out the images below for more details:

 Our Belgian Chocolate Sheer Luxury Body Butter blends the best quality Shea Butter and Organic Coconut Oil with a divinely decadent milk chocolate aroma, wonderfully rich and creamy and reminiscent of the deepest, smoothest Belgian Chocolate that money can buy!

The fragrance will softly linger during the day, bringing you all the pleasure of chocolate without all the calories!

 Our Citrus Sunshine Sheer Luxury Body Butter blends the best quality shea butter and organic coconut oil with a sunshine blend of essential oils including Mandarin, Tangerine and Litsea Cubeba (May Chang).

Essential Oil fragrance elements:

Mandarin - Sweet, citrus aroma with slight floral undertones

Tangerine - Citrus fresh, tangy yet sweet aroma

Litsea Cubeba (May Chang) - Fresh, slightly sweet but strong lemon aroma

This is such a warm, sunshiney, happy and uplifting fragrance, perfect to wake your morning up!

Our Rose Geranium & French Lavender Sheer Luxury Body Butter blends the best quality shea butter and organic coconut oil with a wonderfully floral blend of Rose Geranium and French Lavender Essential Oils.

Essential Oil fragrance elements:

Rose Geranium - A green, sweet fragrance that be sometimes rosy and sometimes softly minty

French Lavender - Fresh, clean and floral/herbaceous aroma with woody undertones

Rose Geranium is a particularly good choice for more mature and is soothing to dry and sensitive skin. It is also thought to stimulate sensuality!

French Lavender is a healing oil which can help to prevent scarring and is good for all skin types, in particular dry, sensitive skin. It is particularly good for sunburn.

This is very soft, floral/herbal fragrance - calming and soothing with a wonderful perfume that will softly linger on your skin throughout the day.

 Our Silky Cocoa Butter Sheer Luxury Body Butter blends the best quality shea butter, organic coconut oil and dark unrefined cocoa butter (which smells like a hunk of chocolate!) with a smooth, seductive cocoa butter fragrance, rich but light and delicately chocolate-y.

The fragrance will softly linger on your skin during the day - you'll smell so sweet and sensual!

Our Vanilla Caramel Sheer Luxury Body Butter blends the best quality shea butter, organic coconut oil and dark unrefined cocoa butter (which smells like a hunk of chocolate!) with a fragrance that is reminiscent of vanilla, rich and creamy with tiny hints of cinnamon and deep, rich, luxurious caramel.

The fragrance will softly linger on your skin during the day - you'll smell so sweet and delicious!

If you are interested in trying out our new Sheer Luxury Body Butter, check out our Soaperstar Store.