Sun Island Body Care

Our Story

Sun Island Body Care was born out of a vacation to a sunny South Pacific Island. The inspiration came from a couple we met selling handcrafted soaps at a swap meet. We decided to give them a try. Both of us suffered from dry, irritated, and itchy skin, and I suffered from rosacea and eczema. After a few weeks of using the artisan soap, there was a noticeable improvement and we loved the exotic tropical fragrances. The skin remained moisturized, smooth and silky unlike the dry feeling after using our regular store-bought soaps.

Our frustration with the soap we normally purchased from our local supermarket led us to research the ingredients to better understand what we were using on our skin. We wanted to know if there was a better solution to having to supplement soaps with creams and lotions to hydrate, moisturize and feed our skin. We thought this was normal! We were wrong!

Some commercially available soaps are not actually soaps, but detergents. Soap is made from the saponification of natural oils, where detergents are manufactured using other chemical processes and may use petrochemicals. To be fair, some commercial soaps use saponification, but the manufacturer may separate some of the natural glycerin to sell it separately as an industrial lubricant, or package it separately into a skin moisturizer! The lack of natural glycerin in soap will leave the skin feeling dry.

Our journey to handcrafting our soaps was born out of frustration in trying to find soaps locally that contained the tropical fragrances we loved. Importing them from our vendor in Hawaii was expensive, but that’s what we did for a year or two until after a return visit, our vendor suggested we should make our the soap ourselves and save on shipping, and duties. Darlene and I purchased a soapmaking starter kit and after a long stretch of bad batches and experimentation, we had successfully made soap that was all-natural, and handcrafted.

 ...