Inspiration
This business was started as a stubborn inspiration: while studying environmental philosophy in England I was introduced to the industrial use of hemp, hemp prohibition, and handmade, herbally-based soaps & cosmetics.
This unusual combination of influences followed me as I traveled around Europe and eventually returned home to California.
Not knowing I was starting a business, I began experimenting with recipes and eventually developed Artha Handmade Soap with Hemp Seed Oil. The word "artha" is Sanskrit (our Indo-European mother tongue) and means riches, abundance and wealth, and is the root of the word earth.
Our name reflects our desire to draw upon our rich, abundant, healthy, and often untapped inheritance.
Principals
The principles of Artha Handmade Soaps are to:
encompass a macro-level definition of health and beauty
in our product design and business plan;
make items that promote health and beauty
for humans as well as the rest of creation;
educate about the industrial use of hemp
in order to usher our society
toward an environmentally-based era;
us the human body and human hand
as the basis for craftsmanship, rhythm, and creation.
Kosmos 
Although soap is not legally a cosmetic (according to the F.D.A.), it might be considered one: it is used everyday to create and maintain order and beauty in our physical and psychic worlds.
Remember, the word cosmetic is derived from the ancient Greek kosmos which means world, order, and universe. Many soaps and cosmetics, while seeming to add order at the individual or micro-level, often tear and rupture the Great Web of Life, creating disorder at the collective or macro-level.
How a product decays is as important as how it is created: the decay process creates the building blocks for new life and beauty.
This is why we choose to use readily renewable, botanically-based ingredients and packaging materials that are bio-degradable, suitable for the home gray water system and compost pile. We want to work with and fit into living systems.
Ingredients
Artha Handmade Hemp Seed Oil Soaps are handmade in small batches with the finest whole ingredients.
We use time-tested recipes which are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old.
The soap is made with food grade coconut oil, California olive oil, California rainwater, and alkali (from sea salt).
We superfat the soap with nourishing hemp seed oil, then add a unique combination of ingredients: aromatherapy-grade essential oils (not synthetic fragrances), whole grain flours, seeds, clay, herbs, spices, plant roots, gums and resins, ingredients which have proven safe over millennia.
Glycerin, a natural by-product of soapmaking, is left in the soap, hydrating the skin by drawing moisture from the air.
The final creation is a gentle, rich soap, great for shaving.
People with environmental sensitivities can often enjoy scented body care products again with our soaps.
Never tested on laboratory animals, always tested on the soapmaker (who is an animal).
Hemp
Hemp, whose botanical name is Cannabis sativa, has been used by humans for at least 10,000 years.
Every part of the plant is useful, it grows in practically any climate, and enriches the poorest of soils.
It does not require the heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers, as cotton does, and yields four times the pulp-per-acre of trees.
It has played an important role in the evolution of human consciousness: It made humanity’s first sails, our first blue jeans, the paper for the Declaration of Independence, shoes in ancient China, a famous vestment of the Virgin Mary in Mexico, fire hoses in France, and Russian peasants stayed healthy by eating hemp seed butter.
Hemp offers healthy alternatives to many of today’s environmentally damaging industries.
Today it is being made into food, medicine, fabric, paint, fuel, and even cellulose plastics.
Hemp Seed Oil
Hemp seed oil is pressed from the live seeds of the plant, Cannabis sativa.
30-40% of the seed is oil, of which 81% is the very healthy poly-unsaturated Essential Fatty Acid known as E.F.A.
E.F.A.s are absorbed by the skin, replenishing natural oils that are damaged by sun and air (UV light & oxygen).
Hemp seed oil is known as an anti-inflamatory, it fortifies the immune system, and has a fantastic softening effect on the skin.