Unakti

A luminous phenomenon, born of snow and silence.
In the ghost village of Milam — once a vital Indo-Tibetan trade hub — we are forming our first Farmers’ Collective with the Bothiya tribe.

Every year, these women hand-harvest glacial seabuckthorn under a traditional quota system. Shade-dried for 14 days, each berry carries the imprint of 6-month snowburials, glacial winds, and the resilience of wild mountain ecosystems.

During our Rasayana infusion, something happened:
The berries glowed.
Sustained, visible light — not shimmer, not reflection.

Scientists might say carotenoid crystals, thermoluminescence, or trace glacial minerals.

But we know what it was.
Prāṇa (Life-force) becoming Tejas (light-fire)
A rare transmission from plant to human.

This batch is now sealed as:
Luminous Grade | Signature Rasayana Infusion.

Only for sacred use. For light-bearing skin rituals. For remembering the intelligence of wild plants.

At Unakti, we’re not waiting for product launches or media campaigns to begin creating impact. We’ve rolled up our sleeves and gone to work, on the land, with the people, for the future.

Our high-altitude botanical garden, nestled in a forgotten ghost village in the Johar Valley, is not a PR stunt. It’s a living act of resistance. We’re regenerating a sloped, barren terrain, once abandoned, now pulsing with potential.

For six months of the year, this land will be submerged under two mt. of snow. The other six, it becomes a proving ground for the most resilient medicinal plants on Earth, plants that must fight to survive, and in doing so, develop extraordinary therapeutic actives. These are not your average herbs. These are warriors of cellular regeneration, UVB protection, and deep, systemic healing.

We’ve honored the living boundary that was already there, wild Himalayan berry bushes, and built the rest by hand using branches and stones unearthed during clearing. Not a single brick. Not a drop of cement. Just respect for the land, and the people who know how to work it.

We’ve employed 17 people directly on this mission:
2 porters brave the steep, narrow paths to bring tools and materials.
9 men have worked on boundary building, stone-lifting, slope stabilization, and site prep.
4 women are tending the soil, sowing seeds, nurturing young plants with the care only ancestral wisdom can offer.
2 women run our homestay and kitchen.

Meanwhile, at our headquarters in Goa, we’ve been busy building a mini food and medicine forest from the ground up, over 400 plants, more than 100 species, and 50+ trees.

No ads. No token campaigns. No corporate gimmicks. Regeneration First. Always.

While most brands still peddle the “buy one, we plant one” trope, weaponizing guilt to sell you something, we’ve already planted hundreds. We’ve restored a whole biome. We’ve brought a ghost village back to life. And we’ve done it without asking for anything in return. This is what a regenerative business model looks like.

We're also tackling the pay gap, rather than talking about it.
Daily wages for men have increased by 43%
Daily wages for women have increased by 67%, fully closing the gender gap.

And here’s the clincher: salary caps are fixed at 10x across the company, from grassroots workers to the founder. No more obscene 1000x executive bonuses. We just deleted two zeroes. Problem solved.

All of This, Pre-Product. Pre-Revenue. Pre-Seed.
We are not VC-backed. We are not driven by traction spreadsheets. We are building slowly, with intent, thanks to a rare kind of investor, Penny Froggatt, a true angel who didn’t ask for metrics, but saw the future through the lens of integrity: Planet - People - Profit.

So when we say we’re regenerating the Himalayas, we mean it. This is not CSR. It’s not ESG. It’s GSR -Genuine Systems Regeneration.

This is a systems-change revolution, we’re birthing a feminine economy of wellbeing.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been living in the heart of the high Himalayas, immersed in the daily rhythm of community life with the extraordinary Bodhiya tribe, from the Indo-Tibetan corridor.

In this remote mountain region, I'm witnessing the living embodiment of matriarchal power, not as dominance, but as selfless devotion.

Here, women lead with quiet strength. They rise before dawn, climb steep hillsides to cut grass for their cows, then return to milk them, churn butter, make ghee and yogurt, all by hand. They grow the food we eat, cook nourishing meals not only for their families but for neighbours and guests alike.

They spin, weave, sew, preserve their ancestral knowledge and traditions, and pass them on, not through speeches, but through action, care, and constancy.

In these women, I see the true matriarch: not sentimental, but fiercely protective. Not seeking praise, but holding it all together, soil, seed, kinship, and culture.

Each day, during our shared Shakti yoga and folk dance sessions, we laugh, we hug, we share, we rest in the warmth of belonging. The air is clean. The water flows from glaciers above. The food is real. And priorities are clear.

This is Indigenous feminine leadership in action, rooted in reciprocity, humility, and resilience. The matriarch asks not “What can I take?” but “How can I protect what protects us all?” This is not charity. It is systems-change. It is creation and care.

Matriarchy must be more than a memory. It must become an ideology, structural, political, and ecological. We need policies that nurture life, not just monetary capital. Communities built not on extraction, but on relationship.

The future doesn’t belong to those who conquer. It belongs to those who care. Patriarchy has had its time, the time of utter devastation, extraction, destruction, oppression, exploitation, violence, abuse and collapse. We know what men can do to us and to our planet.

To truly change the world, feminine free-thinkers must come together to build communities rooted in real care, softness, and courageous leadership.

We need to build a world where humans, animals, plants, and all living beings exist in true symbiosis.

It begins with the Feminine, the power of Shakti, the female force of action, birth and death, creative, protective, and deeply connected to life itself.

Spectacular remote, untouched Himalayas, where the earth meets the sky, we reach a sacred threshold of silence, power and awe.
Far from noise and grasp, we step into a realm of stillness and vastness where the breath slows, the mind clears, and the soul remembers.

Each spring, as the snow melts from the high ridges of the Himalayas, a short-lived yet perilous ritual unfolds. For just 3–4 weeks in May, small groups of foragers, men, women, often entire families, set out above 4,500 metres to extremelly challenging hikes, in search of one of the rarest biological marvels on Earth: Yarsagumba (Ophiocordyceps sinensis), also called the Himalayan caterpillar fungus.

This isn’t just a rare herb, it’s an extraordinary fusion of fungus and insect. A parasitic fungus infects a moth larva underground, mummifies it, then sprouts a slender stalk through the frozen soil.

That delicate brown stem is what hundreds of people risk their lives to find. Thin air, frostbite, deadly falls, avalanches, landslides; these are daily realities for the collectors crawling through alpine meadows to spot a single thread-like growth no longer than a toothpick.

Why such danger? Because Yarsagumba fetches up to €37,000 per kilo in markets like Singapore and Hong Kong. And not without reason. Revered in Traditional Chinese Medicine as a tonic of vital essence and longevity, it has resisted laboratory replication. Its chemical complexity remains unmatched, and science is only just catching up.

Modern research shows Yarsagumba enhances mitochondrial function, increases ATP production, and supports oxygen uptake, offering cellular-level energy and endurance.

For the skin, it’s one of nature’s most potent regenerators: it stimulates repair, shields from oxidative stress, supports collagen integrity, and helps skin adapt and renew under environmental pressure.

It’s not just skincare, it’s cell care.

During our recent R&D expedition across the Himalayan belt, I met several Yarsagumba collectors making their descent, exhausted, sunburned, but carrying the final harvest of the season.

We’re now beginning to collaborate with some of them, not as extractors of rare fungi, but as high-altitude seedling collectors for Unakti’s regenerative nurseries.

Together, we’re helping preserve other endangered alpine botanicals with equal therapeutic potential, without removing them from their ecosystems. This is how we honour the knowledge, courage, and ecological intimacy of these communities.

Yarsagumba reminds us that regeneration often begins where life is hardest, and where those closest to the land still know how to listen.

These two brothers-collectors Ramesh and Mayank, are now part of our Unakti high-altitude Himalayan team, working on phase 2 land prep and seedlings collection for our first botanical nursery that will help on the preservation of some of the extremely powerful, rare an endangered species found at 4000/ 5000 mt above sea-level.

We honour and celebrate these brave, resilient mountain men, embodying a primal masculine force rooted in protection, endurance, and harmony with the wild. They remind us of a hands-on true masculinity that safeguards, rather than dominates.

In the Johar Valley of the Indian Himalayas, at 3,240 meters above sea level, Unakti is working on the ground to restore what’s disappearing: biodiversity, traditional knowledge, and the livelihoods of mountain communities.

The Himalayan region plays a critical role in regulating global climate systems and is home to rare, high-value medicinal plants used in Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine for millenia.

But the ecosystem is under serious threat. Climate change, over harvesting, irresponsible and unsustainable development and land abandonment have made this one of the most vulnerable bioregions on the planet.

At the same time, Indigenous knowledge especially around cultivation, wildcrafting, and ecological balance, is rapidly being lost as younger generations are forced to migrate. Entire villages have emptied. Plants once used in everyday healing are now classified as endangered. What we’re facing is not just environmental degradation, it’s the breakdown of an entire biocultural system.

Unakti chose the Himalayas because the intersection of ecological fragility and cultural erosion demands a regenerative response.

We’re establishing the first Unakti Regenerative Botanical Garden in Tola village, focused on reintroducing native species like Kutki, Lal Jari, and Chippi through shaded terrace cultivation. We are working directly with Indigenous women farmers to grow in ways that respect both the ecology and the deep knowledge systems of the region.

This is our holistic approach to business, because we understand there are no real boundaries between business and nature, between profit and purpose, between human and ecosystem. The most powerful solutions emerge when we stop acting as if we’re separate from the systems we’re trying to heal.

Our success as a company isn’t independent of planetary health. Nature isn’t a machine to be fixed, it’s an intelligent, life-giving partner waiting to co-create with us.

This isn’t a one-off initiative. It’s a long-term, community-led strategy to regenerate degraded land, create dignified livelihoods, and build a decentralized supply ecosystem rooted in biodiversity, not monoculture.

We’re not here to scale quickly but to restore deeply.

I’ve recently returned from two weeks off-grid in the upper Himalayas on glaciers and high-value endangered botanicals R&D.

Up here, between 3,000 and 5,000 metres, the air is thin, the sun strong, and the ice is life. These massif mountain range, stores more frozen water than anywhere outside the polar regions, feeding rivers that keep more than two billion people alive.

The daunting state of this great source of life is hard to miss. Glaciers are shrinking rapidly, springs are slowing, and the region is warming almost twice as fast as the global average. If this “Third Pole” fades, we will all feel the consequences.

But hope still roots itself in Nature. Plants like Jatamansi, Kutki and Lal Jari, thrive where most vegetation can’t. Modern lab work confirms what local mountain healers have always known: these herbs are packed with extremely powerful antioxidants and DNA-repair compounds, molecules that help cells survive extreme environmental stressors and regenerate.

Unakti’s mission is to protect both the bioregion and the plants that help hold it in place. Our holistic approach to commercial business is carefully strategised with a planet-first commitment. We're in pursuit of the rare and the unique: mapping where these endangered plants still thrive, testing how to cultivate them without stripping wild slopes, and recording the traditional knowledge that keeps harvests sustainable. We work with Indigenous female farmer collectives to raise endangered herbs in our high-altitude nurseries and re-green abandoned terraces high on the ridges.

Fair-share pricing, above-market and gender-paired wages give families a reason to stay, slowing migration and keeping culture alive, while their ecological know-how guides every seed we plant and every root we harvest.

One day these alpine botanicals will power the potentially best skincare offerings in the world, a toxin-free dermal-science line, rooted in ancient Ayurveda wisdom and latest green biotechnology, showing that cellular rejuvenation, ecosystem regeneration, and community renewal can advance together.

By preserving and cultivating these powerful botanicals, we safeguard glacier headwaters, revive remote villages and carry unbroken plant intelligence into modern science.

Regenerating the Himalayas is more than a water-security imperative; it is a chance to interlace climate resilience, economic dignity and ancestral wisdom into one living system, proof that caring for our skin can also care for our planet.

This is what a genuine Feminine Economy of Well-being looks like.

Rather than pushing one more chemical-heavy, toxic product in plastic or glass, and funnelling revenue to the usual tech oligarchs, we channel capital to the ground, to the communities who guard the land itself.

We value purposeful frugality over personal excess, care over pure margin, and clear, informed thinking over impulse-driven consumption. That is the kind of growth we believe in.

The future of skin care is 100% clean, 100% plant-based, powered by advanced biotech and delivered in 100% bio-based, biodegradable packaging.

It’s no longer about superficial fixes; deep cellular restoration is taking center stage. As research and clinical studies progress, skin care won’t just be about what you apply, it will be a conversation between your cells, unlocking regeneration and rejuvenation from within.

If you’re wondering why it’s taken us years to launch, that’s the answer. From soil to soul, we’re redefining skin health.

Have you ever tasted moonlight?

In Ayurveda, this subtle yet powerful ritual is known as Chandra Jala (चन्द्र जल)—literally, moon water.

Part of the broader tradition of jala chikitsa (water therapy), Chandra Jala is a sattvic practice used to cool the body, calm the mind, and balance the pitta dosha, which governs fire, heat, and transformation.

To prepare it:

On the night of the full moon, place clean water in a glass or ceramic vessel.

Cover it lightly with a lid or cloth.

Leave it under direct moonlight overnight.

Drink it first thing in the morning, ideally on an empty stomach.

Ayurveda holds that moonlight imbues water with sheetal guna—cooling qualities that nourish the nervous system, reduce inflammation, and support emotional clarity.

This is not a trend. It is a return to ritual. A quiet act of alignment with the intelligence of nature.

It’s very challenging to try and summarize in one sentence what is it that we do, why we do it, and how we do it.

Let’s say we exist to break the rules, to raise the Matriarch, and to create new living-systems that outdated the old ones.

And we do this by placing planet first and profits last.

Because if we cannot take care of the ecosystem that sustain our lives, nothing else will matter.

Watching the sunrise might have a profound impact on our minds. It has been found to boost mood, increase feelings of positivity and hope and reduce stress and anxiety.

The soft, warm light of the rising sun stimulates the production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that promotes feelings of happiness and well-being.

The beauty and tranquillity of the sunrise can also help to clear the mind, enhance mindfulness, and promote a sense of gratitude. It’s truly a powerful experience for their mind and emotions.

Indigenous peoples hold the key to planetary conservation.
They are the true custodians of life and cultural wisdom.
The ones we need to partner with if we are interested in our survival as species.
And that’s exactly what we’re doing at Unakti.
We recognize, we honor, we listen, we learn.
This is Hemma, from the Bhotiya tribe in high altitude Himalayas, in the Indo-Tibetan corridor, where together we nurture rare & unique botanicals for our UltraNatural skincare products, powered by ancient glacier waters from the sacred mountains.