Burt's Bees Honey & Shea Conditioning Body Bar

Burt's Bees Honey & Shea Conditioning Body Bar was a welcome addition to my bath regimen as I can't do without bar soaps (thank you 三 姐 for this). 

It is quite hefty at 140g. 

I forgot how it smells like to be honest, but it is not the obtrusive kind. 

Two inches thick it is. 

The soap cleans well and moisturizes the skin properly. For those preferring 100% natural ingredients, or a good bar soap with added benefits, you can't find fault with this one. 

Ingredients list. 

Beehive. 

Nesti Dante Il Frutteto Soap in Peach and Melon

I first came across Nesti Dante's Il Frutteto range of soaps at Fortnum and Mason in London. The wide variety of scents to choose from was overwhelming and it ended with sniffing and snuffing. I was very glad to receive the Peach and Melon variant as a gift for I adore the scent of peach and love munching on melon. (Thank you S.) 

Nesti Dante is an Italian brand I believe and is known for making quality soap. As described below, the overall scent of this soap is sweet yet not too cloying. 

The paper wrap is a product in itself. It has a lovely print that makes it look quite like stationery paper. 

Opening the soap...it is a very thick soap. The depth is about two and a half inches. 

The soap is stamped with "Made with Love and Care by Nesti Dante at Florence, Italy." Indeed, it must be. This is one hefty soap; it cannot even fit it in my soap case. 

It is soft and smooth, very well-milled. When it comes in contact with water, it turns into a creamy lather, leaving the skin amply moisturized for the whole day. I cannot fault this soap except maybe for the slightly steep price tag. But for the amount one gets (250g) and the pure fruit infusions and lack of chemicals involved, it is worth the occasional indulgence.  

Locally, I have seen the range selling at First Aid in Greenbelt.  

L'Occitane Extra-Gentle Milk Soap

Not to be left behind, the Extra-Gentle Milk Soap from L'Occitane was part of last post's collection.

This came in a smaller size (50g) and was intended as a hand soap, but I opted to use it as a body soap.

 View from the side.

Opening . . .

This Milk soap comes off whiter than the the Verbena, which has a creamy yellow tinge to it. The texture is smooth, rich, second to none. The scent is very delicate and unobtrusive. It cleans really well and I would say moisturizes the skin better than Verbena soap. Between the two, I enjoy using the Milk soap more.

The ingredients list above.

L'Occitane Bath and Shower Series

One of the highlights (at least for me) of staying in hotels is partaking of their complimentary bath amenities . . . especially if they are from L'Occitane!

Pictured above is the evidence of hoarding. I brought home their Shampoo and Conditioner with 3 Essential Oils, Verbena Shower Gel, Verbena Body Lotion, and Verbena Extra-Gentle Soap.

All of them except the soap come in perfectly travel-sized 50ml bottles. I've been using the shampoo for over two months now and have had very good results with it. I can't say anything about the conditioner since I haven't used it (rarely use conditioner).

This tandem is made of three essential oils namely from angelica, lavender, and geranium. The shampoo's scent delivers its blurb on "soothing, repairing, and stimulating properties." Whiffs of calming lavender swirl through the bath when I lather the shampoo on, accompanied by the energizing crisp scents of angelica and geranium. The concentrated plant-based aroma smells very natural, as if the extracts were picked fresh from the plants and infused straight to the bottles. After use, my hair is really softer, shinier, and "repaired." The strands look fuller and moisturized and generally healthier.

The ingredients list. I didn't experience any irritation from the shampoo.

The aluminum cap is very nice to look at and easy to open and close. A round rubber helps keep the products securely covered.

Both body gel and lotion are from the Verbena series which smell like sweet oranges and green tea to me. (Verbena is actually a flowering plant.) The scents are perfectly blended without being annoyingly sweet or cloyingly strong as some bath products go.

The lotion is enriched with grape seed oil, aside from the obvious Verbena extracts. I would classify the consistency as medium rich, as I find it too sticky to use every day in Manila's weather. It works twice or thrice a week perfectly. I put this on my arms and legs when they are feeling dry and looking dull and see good results right away. The shower gel is very friendly to use -- it cleans well and does not irritate my skin. When toweling off, I notice my skin is not as dry as when I use conventional soaps. There seems to be a supple quality to my after-bath skin every time I use this. Also, a few squirts of this gel go a long way to foam up a bath puff. I must mention the scent is absolutely divine.

Ingredients for Verbena Body Lotion and Body Gel above.

I couldn't not try this Verbena Extra-Gentle Soap. Not when it is packaged so nicely in beautiful brown parchment with stamped-on design prints.

It is a hefty 100g bar, square-shaped and around two inches thick. The soap is even wrapped with a white cardboard type paper to protect and keep it in place. I noticed the soap's concentration when it started emulsifying slightly upon contact with my hands.

It has the same citrus-y sweet scent as the other Verbena products. I think the main thing that differentiates this L'Occitane soap from common bar soaps is its smooth "slip" and presence of many nourishing extracts and emollients. It is made of many great ingredients such as shea butter, glycerin, May Chang/mountain pepper extracts, vitamin E, rosemary leaf extracts, and sunflower seed oil. It's hard to ask my drugstore soap to beat that. It cleans the skin very well but does not strip it of moisture. It lathers properly and lasts me about 10 days.

Overall, a very satisfying set from a brand that incorporates more natural than chemically-produced ingredients.

Lux Bar Soap by Unilever

I grew up using bar soaps for my daily baths. There weren't any shower gels or creams available in supermarkets in the Philippines while I was growing up, so I am accustomed to using the bar type of soap. Behold my surprise when I was browsing the supermarket aisles in Hong Kong, and couldn't find a single soap bar.  Here in Manila we now have so many choices of bar, liquid, cream, gel washes from local and foreign brands. I've been using Lervia Milk Soap for a long time, but I chanced upon these soaps by Lux, a brand I have had good experiences with. 

Lux soaps come in three variants: Velvet Touch and Soft Touch for their softening and smoothing functions; Wake Me Up for freshening. I personally do not buy these claims but I was curious whether these would clean properly without drying out my skin, which is what I try to look for with body soaps. It's small at 85g so I got all three kinds to try.

I wasn't able to take pictures of the unpacked soaps, but to illustrate, they have chiseled corners and lovely marbelized strips of color for the Soft Touch (pink) and Wake Me Up (blue).

It's interesting to note that Unilever wrote different descriptions for the blue bar and the white and pink ones. The Wake Me Up bar is to make one "feel recharged and refreshed." While the Velvet Touch and Soft Touch "reveal caressable soft & smooth skin." These little things really do matter to me : )

Lux Wake Me Up, which happens to be my favorite of the three, claims to have icy mineral salts and seaweed infused into the bar. I prefer this blue bar because it leaves my skin softer and more moisturized compared to the Velvet Touch and Soft Touch. Between the white and pink bar, I would choose the pink bar because it is less drying. The white bar is the least moisturizing of the three, but still provides more moisture than Lervia, which I was pretty happy with before discovering the Lux range. They all clean very well though.

Both Soft Touch and Velvet Touch contain oils from apricot kernels, sweet cherries, and grape seeds. They share all other ingredients except for lauric acid, methylchloroisothiazolinone, methylisothiazolinone, and CI 12490 which are present in Soft Touch (pink) only; disodium distyrulbiphenyl disulfonate is in Velvet Touch (white) only. 

They say the simpler the ingredient list of a product, the more cosmetically elegant and friendlier to sensitive skins it is. Wake Me Up indeed sports a shorter ingredient list than Soft Touch and Velvet Touch. I spy fucus vesiculosus, a seaweed that is also known in the name of bladderwrack. So it's true that the blue bar has seaweed infused; I'm just not sure about the icy minerals. I guess this bar delivers better results (softer skin) because it does not contain as many chemicals as the first two.

These bar soaps are very affordable at P17.85 each. I really enjoy using these in the bath especially the pink and blue ones. These are worth checking out if you are fond of bar soaps. A tidbit: it's sold for P2 more in the department store in Landmark Makati than its supermarket, which is only one floor below. If you don't mind the small effort of walking a few more steps, you can save some loose change.