Every product here is made by hand by a collective of fifty women in Village Hurlung, Jharkhand.

Skin food. Whole-plant, hand-made, and unchanged in method for longer than most brands have existed.

Handmade in small batches by a women's collective in Village Hurlung, Jharkhand. Cold-processed, solar-powered, and unchanged in method for the better part of two decades.

What you notice, in order

  • Smell

    The inside of a jar of mahua oil before it has been opened.

  • Touch

    Oil that doesn't slide. It settles.

  • Sound

    Mortar on stone. Hands working without an audience.

  • Sight

    The colour of good oil against light. Amber, shifting.

  • Warmth

    Warm first, then settling. Heat from something dense rather than heated.

What the work shows through

  • ~50

    women employed — around ninety per cent of the workforce

  • 50+

    children in English-medium education funded by the enterprise

  • 100%

    solar powered, with no pollutant discharge from production

  • 2010

    National Award for small enterprise, presented by the President of India to the CEO

Many Categories, One Method

Made by fifty women, in a village most maps skip.

The Mahuvaa Co. is the UK face of Neev Herbal Handmade Soaps — a rural women's enterprise founded in Village Hurlung, Jharkhand, where roughly fifty women make up ninety per cent of the workforce.

What the business earns goes back into the place it came from: a school teaching more than fifty children in English, a gaushala, and funding that sends girls on to higher education.

National Award MSME 2010 · AYUSH certified · BIS/GMP · ITL Grade 'A' · Solar powered

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Skin Food

Twenty-six botanicals, and where they come from

Grown on our own organic farms in Jharkhand, or sourced within the district. A few — saffron, sandalwood — come from further afield, because they have to.

What experience knew. What science looked at.

  • Saffron

    Around a hundred and fifty flowers for a single gram. The ingredient Kumkumadi is named for.

  • Mahua

    Gathered at dawn from the forest floor. The tree this brand is named for.

  • Sandalwood

    In almost everything we make. Cooling, in the older sense of the word.