Learning how to get aloe vera gel from your aloe plant is a handy skill to have! My son recently had a bad experience with a chemical hand sanitizer. We rarely use them but we were out and about and I didn’t have any other option.
After the rash cleared up, I decided to make homemade hand sanitizing spray for those times when we couldn’t get to soap and water. Most articles seemed to say “Combine alcohol with aloe vera gel and add essential oils’. I could do that! I have a nice-sized aloe plant and would just have to figure out how to get aloe vera gel from inside it!
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How To Get Aloe Vera Gel From Your Aloe Plant
I turned to my friend Google to learn how to get the gel from an aloe vera plant. Google says: Wash, slice open, and scoop out. Easy right? Well, let me just share with you the experience I had as I figured out how to get aloe out of the plant! (please note, the aloe gel you get from this is for EXTERNAL use only!) Certain purification has to be done when you get aloe vera from a plant before it is safe for consumption.
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Extracting your aloe gel: Step one!
The first step of extracting aloe vera gel from an aloe plant is to actually have an aloe plant that is large enough to provide you with a sufficient amount of aloe gel. I have had mine growing on the patio for about a year and the stalk I chose was over a foot long. Make sure you choose a nice, thick stem and cut it at the base of the plant with a sharp knife.
Why does my aloe vera plant stink?
As soon as you chop off that stem to get aloe vera gel from your plant, you are going to notice some clear, yellow liquid seeping out of the bottom of the stem. This stuff smells VILE and I assume it is some attempt by the plant to discourage critters from eating all its’ tasty aloe stems.
Prop your stalk up in a small bowl and let the yellow stuff just seep out for 10 minutes or so.
Wash your aloe stems before extracting aloe gel
Once you have let the yellow, stinky goo come out of your aloe vera stem, it is time to wash it and move on to actually extracting aloe vera gel from your aloe plant. Just run under cold water, making sure you rinse off the end where the yellow liquid came out. Dry it off on a kitchen towel and grab a sharp knife.
Lay your aloe vera leaf on a cutting board and slice it lengthwise right up the middle. You are basically filleting the aloe vera leaf like you would a fish. Open up the two halves and place them on your board.
Isolating the aloe vera gel from the plant
Now comes the frustrating, slimy, and messy part of this process. You need to get the gel OUT of the leaf. Use a spoon and scoop the aloe gel out from inside while simultaneously trying to hold onto it and preventing it from slipping out of your hands onto the floor.
I really thought that the aloe vera ‘gel’ would be just like the liquid stuff you buy in the store. It is NOT. Yes, there is some stuff that is liquid that comes out of the leaf but most of it is a firm, gelatinous substance that resembles hardened jello.
The liquidy stuff that you can extract will resemble something that came out of your toddler’s nose the last time they had a horrible head cold.
The rather firm aloe vera gel that resembles a fun children’s dessert can be put into a small food processor and pureed until it is smooth and more liquid than solid. Once you have your aloe vera gel, you can make your own DIY Hand Sanitizing Spray as I did.
Using homemade aloe gel
I will say, though, that the homemade stuff left some particulates in my spray and I had to blend it with the alcohol in a personal-size blender before it went into the solution.
The spray turned out fine and works well, though, and I didn’t have to go BUY aloe vera gel which saved me a few pennies! Make sure that you store this in a glass spray bottle and I recommend keeping it in the refrigerator. Want to know how to get aloe out of a plant? Watch this video from Howcast.com!
There are a ton of uses for aloe vera gel so keeping a plant or two around the house is definitely a smart idea. Check out Wiki How to learn how to grow aloe vera. Have any tips on how to get aloe vera gel out of the plant without quite so much work?
Diane is a professional blogger and nationally certified pharmacy technician at Good Pill Pharmacy. She earned her BS in Microbiology at the University of New Hampshire and has worked in cancer research, academics, and biotechnology. Concern over the growing incidence of human disease and the birth of her children led her to begin living a more natural life. She quickly realized that the information she was learning along the way could be beneficial to many others and started blogging and freelance writing to share this knowledge with others. Learn more about her HERE.
I have two plants growing on my window sill and often wondered how to get to gel from it. Thanks.
Why does the gel turn pink after you add stuff to it.this happen twice to me.
Im not sure! I have never seen that happen before!
Hello and hope all is well! Not sure if you will see this response since it is 3yrs later. However to answer your question, the reason why your product is turning pink is due to the presence of that yellow latex substance that was in one of the pictures show after cutting the leaf. In order to throughly remove this it is best to cut into smaller pieces and soak the leaf for AT LEAST 1 or 2 hrs, changing the water every 30min or so. Or until the soaking water is clear. Hope this was helpful.
Thanks so much for your input on this!