Soapnut or Areetha/Reetha is the berry of the tree belonging to the genus Sapindus. It is found growing commonly in India. I believe it also grows easily in Goa.
Someone I know has a HUGE tree growing in their garden - probably 4-5 floors high. She gave me a bagfull of dried reetha berries, since I'd mentioned I wanted to try washing clothes with it.
That was probably in March.
Finally I've gotten round to using it. I tried making liquid soap from it. I read somewhere online that you could boil about 100gms of reetha with about 2 ltrs of water. Some people don't like the smell of reetha, but I think it's rather nice, especially when it's boiling. Still, I added about 4-5 drops of lavender essential oil and the entire house was smelling heavenly!
I let it cool and strained out about a liter of brownish liquid. I've used it to wash my hair, some curtains that hadn't been washed in the last 8-9 months and two cotton dhurries. I used a washing machine for the last two.
The hair seems to be ok. It's only been one wash. Let me try and stick to just this for a few washes, and see what happens to my hair.
The curtains - well, they see, clean enough, nothing special.
The dhurries are on the clothes line, dripping dry.
As they say, early days. Let's wash some more and see what results we get.
There are some commercially available packs of reetha pods that are meant to be used in the washing-machine. I've heard about people using them, never met one who has, so nothing first-hand to relate to.
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