Development of a Herbal Soap by Palm Oil

Abstract

Production of soap by using palm oil and palm kernel oil is popular for many reasons, because it adds hardness to the soap and produces a stable, creamy lather and also is has most important fatty acids involved in soap making process. In fact palm oil is now the most widely used vegetable oil in the planet accounting more than 65 percent of all vegetable oil traded, major aim of this study is to add more values to palm oil by producing a high quality herbal soap. Therefore, it is necessary to produce a soap that strikes a balance among the physicochemical parameters such as pH value, total fatty matter and total alkalinity. Suitable combinations of palm oil and herbal additives were used to make the soap while measuring physiochemical parameters first. When consider measured pH values of the samples, most of them were closed to the present herbal soaps. However a feasibility study for making palm oil based herbal soap is to be done. It can be concluded that making a high quality palm oil based herbal soap will add more values for the palm oil and the corresponding industries.