Buttering up Kate Ritchie

We meet the really very lovely Kate Ritchie of Home & Away, now Vaseline brand ambassador, at a lunch at Soul bar launching their Cocoa Butter skincare with a ‘Superfoods for Skin’ menu designed by TV’s Downsize Me star, Damian Kristof…

We meet the really very lovely Kate Ritchie of Home & Away, now Vaseline brand ambassador, at a lunch at Soul bar launching their new Cocoa Butter skincare range.

A ‘Superfoods for Skin’ menu was designed for the occasion by TV’s Downsize Me star, Damian Kristof.

The new range includes Deep Conditioning Body Lotion ($8.89) and Smoothing Body Butter ($11.99) with rich cocoa butter to smooth away dryness and roughness and melt into skin easily leaving a cocoa butter fragrance.

"This is my first visit to New Zealand" Kate said. "I had to ask in the cab why they said ‘Kia ora’ at the beginning AND at the end!"

Kate Ritchie was very down to earth and conversational with the group, sharing about her mum and her fiance, (St George Illawara Dragons player Stuart Webb) not normally topics celebrities will go near. She seemed very unaffected and normal despite having the record of 20 years working on Home & Away as Sally Fletcher until 2008, since she was 8 years old in 1988. Ritchie starts filming in May for Nine’s police drama Cops LAC.

"I’ve been Brand Ambassador for Vaseline over a year now. I’m often asked to put my name to things but when Vaseline came along it made sense cos I didn’t have to pretend I liked a product as Vaseline has been in my mother’s drawer since I was a child."

"Actually, in Sydney recently an ad involved my mum. She was freaking out, really nervous. She only had an hour on set and she was telling me what to do! I was like, Mum, I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have!"

Normally a self-confessed big fan of red wine – and not just for its antioxidant properties of reservratrol Damian Kristof was extolling – Kate Ritchie made a comment that she can’t drink wine now and she didn’t dig into the scampi, which got the Beauty Editors thinking she may be pregnant! But you didn’t hear it here.

The first course: Scampi cocktail with avocado and spinach with Akaroa smoked salmon with salsa verde, all rich in selenium, zinc and Omega 3. This was followed by Bluff oysters (with added aphrodisiac benefits) with a green tea and soy dressing, and the meal finished with kiwifruit pavlova with fresh kiwi fruit (those tini mini sized ones- downsize me, indeed) and pomegranate.

The pavlova of course uses eggs- the largest single cell that you can see – rich in proteins. Damian ate 28 eggs a week for 3 years for Downsize Me, monitered by a doctor, and his cholesterol went down amazingly from 4.1 to 3.7!