Toilet Soap Research Paper

Mak-Mensah E. E., et al (2011) in Ghana studied Chemical characteristics of toilet soap prepared from neem (Azadirachta indica A. Juss) seed oil. Neem oil was obtained from the seeds of the neem tree, Azadirachta indica, exploiting a manually operating bridge press, and used to prepare toilet soap. The essence of the neem oil was because of its medicinal substitute for the Palm oil which was usually used. The advantage of the cold press process over the hot press process was used to reduce the smell of the oil extraction and a different method of saponification was used which was an advantage to the levels of free fatty acids and free caustic alkali content. A flaw in the methodology turned out to be an advantage since the unreacted relatively

et al wrote a literature review on Neem. In their work they stated that it is the most versatile, multifarious trees of tropics, with immense potential. It possesses maximum useful non-wood products (leaves, bark, flowers, fruits, seed, gum, oil and neem cake) than any other tree species. These non-wood products are known to have antiallergenic, antidermatic, antifeedent, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, antipyorrhoeic, antiscabic, cardiac, diuretic, insecticidal, larvicidal, nematicidal, and spermicidal properties and other biological activities. They recorded that the most useful product of the tree are the seeds which yield 40% of oil. The neem oil is useful for medicinal and technical purposes. ‘National Research Council (NRC), Washington, USA considers the neem, “One of the most promising of all plants and the fact is that it may eventually benefit every person on this planet. Probably no other plant yields as many strange and varied products or has as many exploitable byproducts.” ’. Neem has found enormous applications making it a green

O. M., et al performed an experiment on soap production using various blends of neem oil and shea butter oil at different ratios (i.e. 100:0, 80:20, 60:40, 50:50, 40:60, 20:80 and 0:100 (wt:wt)). The physical properties of the prepared soap including hardness, foamability and pH were analysed. All soap samples prepared exhibited antibacterial properties of varying degrees. It was observed that, the soap samples produced using just neem oil were of the highest hardness as well as those produce using just shear butter. However, a mixture of the two decreases the hardness of soap. The degree of hardness of the soaps produced form just neem oil and that produced from just shear butter was also found to be close. There is no significant effect on the foamability when the two oils are mixed. The pH of all soap samples fell within the recommended range for bathing soap of 9-11. The soap prepared using shea butter oil alone exhibited the highest antibacterial property as compared to a commercial antiseptic soap containing