Smoothies
Body Smoothy: How to Make Your Own Aloe Vera Gel Cream
A Smoothie for Your Body
No, the name of the recipe is not a typo, since this smoothie makes the body smoothy.
Handling a huge fun-to-squeeze leaf of aloe vera makes me dream of being an herbivorous dinosaur nibbling on this plant 70 million years ago. Is that weird? It’s just so smooth and spiky, and it feels like the kind of ergonomic gel pad you might use when typing at your keyboard, which, now that I think of it, is probably another great use for this leaf!
Aloe vera gel contains vitamins A, C, and E, which are popular in expensive skin creams — usually the more of these vitamins are packed into a cream or lotion, the more it costs. Each letter of the vitamin alphabet is like another kaching, kaching at the cash register. The aloe vera leaf also contains polysaccharides, phytosterols, enzymes, minerals (zinc, copper, magnesium), anthraquinones, amino acids, gibberellins and auxins. A leaf of aloe vera is like a molecular Who’s Who? of compounds you read about on skin cream labels, ads and online descriptions. Its pH balance is also suitable for direct application to skin and hair.
One aloe vera gel leaf, though, costs just ~$2 Canadian dollars in my area, versus 10–50 times that to get creams that contain similar ingredients on the shelves at Sephora. In this time of runaway global inflation and stagnant wages, you might think that making your own skin cream with a two dollar leaf would be something everyone is doing at home.
Caveat: everyone’s skin is different and who knows, yours may not take to an application of raw aloe vera gel, so rub a little bit on a patch of your skin before using it all over your body and hair, just to make sure your epidermis is accepting of it. If your skin starts to itch, puff up, boil, blister, or little gremlin versions of you start popping out of your hide and run crazy around the place, that’s probably a good idea not to use it as a skin cream or in hair care. You can also try diluting it with water, if you find it’s a tad strong for your skin.
Making aloe vera gel cream is easy but there are a few steps. First, cut off the ends and spiky edges, so you can see the gel-stuff all the way around the leaf.
You now need to soak it for around 30 minutes because in addition to the whitish stuff you see (the aloe vera gel), there’s also a yellowish brown substance that is latex (also called aloe latex), which has laxative properties. Relieving constipation has been one of its uses in traditional remedies.
That being said, the FDA does not approve ingesting aloe vera gel and so I won’t recommend it, but online there are plenty of videos of people eating aloe vera gel and not dying, for what it’s worth. Soaking the trimmed aloe leaf in a large bowl for at least half an hour helps flush out the laxative latex substance, and this article is mainly interested in the white substance for topical (not internal consumption) uses.
Aloe gel is quite slimy, and I don’t find that there’s a high need for slimy food in my diet, since okra presents enough of a slime-challenge. I used to eat escargot but my days of eating slimy animals are over. Can you think of any food where sliminess would really bring out the flavor notes or provide a needed contrast in texture? Online videos show people blending aloe gel into smoothies — to make them slimier — or just licking the gel out of the leaf directly, which is kinda sexy.
After soaking it for at least half an hour, make a small notch with a sharp knife to separate the green leaf away from the gel at one side of the larger end, just enough to give you some fingertip room. And with that fingertip room, peel that side of the leaf away from the gel just using your hand, with the leaf end pinched in your fingers.
With the knife, scrape the white gel off the other leaf face, and any remaining on the leaf face you started with (you’re basically fileting it). Scrape it off onto a large baking sheet or bowl or whatever makes sense to you as a place to scrape slimy gel onto. Once you’re done scraping, just put it into a small food processor or blender and hit the atomize button.
You can pour the liquified gel through a large tea strainer to remove any larger chunks that didn’t get processed, leaving you with a very nice gel cream.
Since it is fresh food, it will go bad, as there are no expensive cosmetic ingredients in there putting it into suspended animation for a long shelf life, so store it in your fridge and use it on your skin and hair for a similar number of days that you’d be willing to eat anything refrigerated after it’s been cooked or prepped.
Keeping it in the fridge is also handy if you use alcohol-based hand sanitizers in the home. Since I have a dog, I am frequently handling raw meat and need to clean my hands well afterwards with everyone’s favorite post-Covid molecule. After applying the hand sanitizer, I follow up with the aloe gel to restore my hands and wrist. You can also freeze it if you think you may not use all the gel before its freshness expires.
This homemade two dollar gel also works as a great after shave, and I should know, since I shave my head. My face and head composite makes for one large shaving surface area, and why pay Nivea for Vitamin E infused shaving balm when I can just go to my fridge and rub chilled aloe gel all over my head for pennies on the dollar?
My skin is in much better shape using the gel of this cool dinosaur-era looking leaf, but I guess the only way you can verify this is by coming to visit me in person and rubbing my head to see, or actually feel, for yourself. Currently there’s a long line running along the block, it takes about two hours to get through, but I think it’s worth the experience to rub my aloe’d head ;) and hey, Vancouver is a fun place to visit, anyway!
