REETHA(Sapindus mukurossi)
The spring of northern India is celebrated with Holi, or the Festival of color. Participants smear orange, purple, red, green, yellow dyes, powders, and paints over each other’s heads and bodies. As any visitor to India who has been a part of this festival will know, it is very difficult to rid the hair of this rainbow of colors. My own experience supports the claims made for the traditional soap-nut hair wash. Western shampoos not only do not rid the hair of these colors, they also leave the hair dry and brittle for weeks, where as a soap - nut shampoo rinses out the colors while conditioning the hair and the scalp at the same time.
The soap nut is a large deciduous tree with fleshy fruit like a berry which yields a soap. Unlike the soaps produced by pharmaceutical companies, the substance taken from this fruit does not have a high acid content. Using the soap nut as a base, Indian women often concoct their own shampoos, frequently mixing it with a medicinal combination of the three myrobalans or other ingredients such as turmeric or coconut pulp. It is the delicate action of the sopa-nut fruit, known to Indians as ritha, which has made it the favored Indian washing medium for the most valuable fabrics and shawls. It does not bleach out the delicate natural dyes of Kashmir embroidery or harm the gold and silver threads woven into India’s most expensive brocades and silks.
The seeds of the soap-nut tree yield a thick viscous oil which can cause acute nausea and acrid poisoning. The oil is used with extreme caution by Ayurvedic physicians in drugs made for patients suffering from severe cases of chronic diarrhea or cholera. Ayurveda also uses pessaries made from the fruit to induce childbirth, both the purposes of abortion and for cases of difficult delivery, while other concoctions are made into nose drops and administered through the nostrils to relieve attacks of hysteria, epilepsy, and Hemicrania.