This is a little story about how our Island Hopping Soap was born. It’s more than just something that gets you clean, it’s an experience that I want to pass on to you.
In 2023, I went back to the Philippines for a holiday and we went island hopping for the first time. If you don’t know this, the Philippines consists of over 1,100 different islands, each with their own identity. On this holiday, I was swimming in open water almost everyday, with the bluest and clearest oceans. I realised being in the ocean for me is one of the most peaceful places, but it wasn’t always that way.
Contrary to what you might think of an island country, a lot of people from Metro Manila, where I was born, aren’t super strong swimmers and you might see why - it’s an urban concrete jungle, where Manila Bay, it’s most prominent beach, is actually unsafe for swimming due to pollution. To really get the white sands and blue ocean that you see in postcards, you’d have to travel to other areas..
So when I moved to Australia, my parents were very adamant that we learn how to swim. I spent my first three years in a little well-known coastal town called Merimbula. We went to the beach most weekends in the summer but I was actually both a fan, and also kinda terrified of the water.
We moved to a country town later and had swimming programs as a mandatory part of the school curriculum and I even ‘under-sold’ how well I could float because I was afraid of being in a higher group and swimming in the deep end. After this, my parents decided it wasn’t enough so on the weekends we’d get extra swimming lessons, where we learnt really quickly and learnt how to be confident in our strokes and our stamina.
In the summers we would then drive down to a coastal town in Port Macdonell with friends and frolic about in the water. Slowly I got confident with waves, and also realised if the wave took me and I panicked, I would stay down, but if I accepted it and waited until it passed (like with a lot of things in life), I could actually figure out which way was up. Then pull myself up without swallowing water. Essentially, the more I was scared of the ocean, the more it would take me. I had to sit in it.
So as I sat there on the boat watching these experienced Filipino sea-men in awe, and swam in the open water. It wasn’t just the clear water lapping on my sides (it was a strong current that day actually!) and looking up at the sky that made me feel serene and secure, it was also my newfound relationship and understanding with the ocean. I had to bottle that feeling up and put it into something, so I put it into this soap.
I chose these clear transparent layers to depict the Philippine ocean and combined a scent that is ozonic, fresh and salty with a tiny tropical touch of coconut. I hope that when you use this in the shower you think of floating in warm tropical water and looking up at nothing but the sky.