Could she pull it off?
Could she found a business that expressed her love of gifting and her experience of karma?
Could she respect the earth while doing it?
In June of 2017 Constanza Smita Ontaneda Rehman-Khedker (Constanza Ontaneda for short...phew) founded Give Soap. She'd learned how to make soap in 2012 (normal soap....not magic soap), and was bewitched by the process: the transmutation of ingredients, the danger (oh yes...beware the lye!), the curing process. It cured something inside of her.
She made it non-stop.
Literally.
But it was years before she got the idea for Give Soap...
Looking back, she remembered how she'd travelled to Lima, Perú, where she grew up. A gorgeous transgender mother figure, Paloma Zapata, gave her a bottle of Obsession aftershave by Calvin Klein that had belonged to her father Pablo. Opening that bottle and smelling the contents brought her back a couple of decades to the time when her father was alive, before he'd died of AIDS when she was seven.
She appreciated Paloma's gesture...
But didn't want to keep the bottle forever...
it felt...uncomfortable.
Back in Brooklyn, while making a batch of soap, she felt a sudden powerful impulse to pour the entire bottle in. And so she did. Although this isn't the proper way to scent soap, the batch turned out well. After the soap had cured, she put it in a box and wrote KARMA SOAP on the side. She gave that soap to everyone she knew who needed to heal some aspect of their relationship with her father—including herself.
That gesture was the seed of Give Soap.
Give the Gift of Cleansing Karma.
