Practical Self Reliance: Homemade Hand Sanitizer Gel

Ashley Adamant at Practical Self Reliance tells us how to make our own hand sanitizer gel.

Homemade hand sanitizer is surprisingly easy to make, and it’s a great way to fight germs when you can’t get to a sink to wash your hands.

Hand sanitizer is one of the first things to disappear during an outbreak, second only to face masks. Just days after the first community transmission of COVID-19, shelves emptied as people suddenly rushed out to buy hand sanitizer.

I’ll admit it, I was one of those people that bought a bottle once the virus reached the US.

Hand sanitizer isn’t generally a part of our lives, and under normal circumstances, I’d rather just wash my hands regularly and rely on my strong immune system.

This flu season though, as I watch people sneeze their way down the aisles of the supermarket, I find myself wishing I had a little bottle in my pocket.

I found a bottle easy enough, but just days later the store shelves were empty and most people weren’t as lucky.

In truth, substitutes for commercial hand sanitizers are actually really easy to make. The active ingredient is just rubbing alcohol, and so long as your homemade hand sanitizer is at least 60% alcohol, it’s effective when used properly according to the CDC.

Simply putting rubbing alcohol in a small spritz bottle will do the trick, so long as you thoroughly wet your hands, rubbing to get between your fingers and such.

That said, if you’re looking for a more elegant solution, I’ve found a few options for homemade purell substitutes.

What’s In Purell?

So for starters, what’s actually in purell anyway?

The ingredients list is pretty long, but once you decode it, it’s actually just three basic things:

Water ~ Still not sure why this is the first ingredient when it’s more than 60% alcohol?

Isopropyl Alcohol ~ The active ingredient that’s doing all the hard work.

Caprylyl Glycol ~ Skin conditioner

Glycerin ~ Antimicrobial properties, and natural skin conditioner

Isopropyl Myristate ~ Emmoliant that promotes skin absorption (for skin conditioners)

Tocopheryl Acetate ~ Vitamin e for skincare

Acrylates/C10-30 Alkyl Acrylate Crosspolymer ~ “is a synthetic ingredient used as a thickening agent, texture enhancer, film-forming agent, and emulsifier in cosmetics and personal care products.” (Source)

Aminomethyl Propanol ~ Buffer to adjust pH

Fragrance ~ With all that rubbing alcohol, this really helps sell it…

So in a nutshell, gel hand sanitizers are denatured alcohol, skin conditioners and some kind of gelling agent. That’s it.

The skin conditioners are handy if you’re using it multiple times a day, and can help prevent dry hands. In truth they’re optional, and using a separate lotion works just as well to prevent dry skin.

Gelling agents are there to help the sanitizer sit neatly in your hand and prevents dripping, which in turn results in more people using it. If it drips on your lap or makes a mess, you’re less likely to use it. That said, they’re not actually sanitizing your hands…so also optional.

So the only thing sanitizing your hands is alcohol (and maybe the glycerine if you want to get technical). The simplest option for an effective homemade hand sanitizer is simply rubbing alcohol (at least 60%) in a squirt or spray bottle.

That said, if you’d like to actually try to re-create a gel hand sanitizer with skin conditioners and a gel texture, read on….

How to Make Hand Sanitizer Gel

There’s a recipe circulating on the internet for a really simple homemade gel hand sanitizer that simply uses 2 parts 90+% rubbing alcohol and 1 part aloe vera gel.

My first thought was that with 2 parts alcohol it’d never be a “gel,” but I put it to the test…

The alcohol is doing the sanitizing work, and the aloe vera gel adds both skin conditioners and a gel-like texture, at least in theory.

Aloe vera gel, however, is actually mostly alcohol. Or at least most of the bright green “after sun gel” bottles commonly available. Their ingredients list stats exactly the same way as purell…water, denatured alcohol, glycerine, followed by a long list of stabilizers and gelling agents, with just a teeny tiny bit of aloe juice.

I doubt aloe gel is anywhere near the required 60% alcohol, but it is full of chemical gelling agents that work in the presence of alcohol (plus a few skin conditioners for good measure).

(It’s actually hard to make a gel from alcohol. Things like agar, gelatin, and arrowroot won’t work in a high alcohol solution. I tried, for science, to come up with a more natural version, but polymers are what works…)

One part aloe gel and two parts alcohol went into a bottle…

Two parts alcohol (91%) with 1 part aloe gel in a bottle, not yet mixed.

It took a lot of shaking to get them to combine, and initially, the mixture was pretty thin. I was unconvinced.

About a half an hour later when I picked up the bottle, it had actually thickened considerably. Give it a shake and it’d actually hold air bubbles within the gel in the bottle.

Look closely, you can see them in there, held in a totally passable homemade hand sanitizer gel.

Hand sanitizer with aloe gel forms a loose gel that actually holds bubbles and is a good bit thicker than alcohol alone.

There is one more crucial part missing…fragrance. While it is technically optional, this stuff smells horrible. Or, more accurately, it smells like very strong rubbing alcohol, which is a little nasty.

I asked my husband to put it on his hands just so I could take a picture for the article and he straight up refused. Too stinky.

If you’re going to convince anyone to use this, consider adding a few drops of some kind of fragrance. Something like lavender or tea tree essential oil, which also have anti-microbial properties…

Continue reading about how to make a homemade sanitizer spray as well at Practical Self Reliance.

Practical Self Reliance: Making Herbal Healing Salve

Here’s a nice beginner how-to from Ashley at Practical Self Reliance on how to make healing salves. She includes a general recipe and then several herb-specific recipes toward the end. I like to use a calendula salve for minor skin injuries which is similar to the Gardener’s Healing Salve recipe she links. I’ve only included some of the key parts of the article below, more detail is through the article links.

Herbal healing salves are simple and effective ways to enjoy the benefits of herbal medicine, and they couldn’t be easier to make at home. Salves are semi-solid at room temperature, making them easy to transport and store. When they come in contact with skin, the botanicals go to work, released by our own body heat for absorption through the skin.

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I’ll admit it, as a budding herbalist I was intimidated by making my own salves. Homemade tinctures and infused oils are easy enough, just place herbs in a medium and wait.

It took me over a decade of herbal practice before I made my first herbal salve. Start to finish, the whole process only lasted about 10 minutes and I had a whole counter full of homemade herbal medicines. Why had I waited so long to try this?!?!?!

…Usually, healing salves are made with just a few ingredients. Often just three ingredients are enough to get the job done, those being herbs, oil, and beeswax…

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Yield: About 8 Ounces

How to Make a Herbal Healing Salve

Active Time: 10 minutes

Additional Time: 10 minutes

Total Time: 20 minutes

Difficulty: Easy

Estimated Cost: $5 to $6 per batch

Herbal healing salves are incredibly versatile, and this semi-solid topical herbal medicine is an easy way to incorporate natural herbal remedies into your routine.

Materials

Herbal Infused Oil

1 1/2 cups carrier oil (olive, almond, grapeseed, etc)

1/2 to 1 cup dried herbs

Healing Salve

1 cup (8 Ounces) Herbal Infused Oil

1 ounce (or 1 heaping tablespoon) Beeswax Pistils

Tools

Pint Mason Jar

Fine Mesh Strainer

Double Boiler

(or saucepan & heatproof bowl)

Salve Tins

(or other containers)

Instructions

Herb Infused Oil

Add dried herbal material to a pint mason jar. Cover completely with about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of oil.

Allow the oil to infuse at room temperature for 3 to 6 weeks before straining through a fine-mesh strainer. (Note: Some of the oil will absorb into the herbal material, so starting with slightly more than 1 cup of oil should yield about 1 cup for making a herbal salve.)

Herbal Healing Salve

Measure about 1 cup of herb infused oil. Place it in a heat proof bowl (or double boiler). Add about 1 inch of water to a small saucepan and then place the bowl over the water. Turn the heat on low and gently heat the oil.

Add in about 1 ounce of beeswax pistils (roughly 1 heaping tablespoon). Stir gently until melted.

Remove the oil/wax mixture from the heat and pour it into containers.

Allow the salve to cool to room temperature and reach a semi-solid state before using it.

Notes

The amount of beeswax used is a matter of personal preference. Feel free to use more for a firmer healing salve, or less for a softer more spreadable herbal salve…

Click here to read the entire article at Practical Self Reliance.

The Herbal Academy: How to Make Calendula Salve

Practical Self Reliance: Homemade Elderberry Syrup

Ashley of Practical Self Reliance has a nice, detailed article on making immune-boosting elderberry syrup at home. My family has made and used elderberry at home for a few years now. We’ve used elderberry syrup, elderberry rob, and elderflower syrup. If you don’t have elderberries at home, you can purchase commercial Sambucol – an over the counter elderberry syrup. Our young children like taking the syrups, but not the rob which has a more medicinal taste. Nonetheless I’ll include an elderberry rob recipe after the Practical Self Reliance excerpt.

Elderberry syrup is a common immune-boosting home remedy for colds and flus. It can be expensive to purchase, but homemade elderberry syrup is easier than you think…

Benefits of Elderberry Syrup

While elderberry has been a folk remedy for centuries, modern science is validating these age-old uses. Studies have found that elderberry syrup can reduce the duration of flus, as well as boost the immune system in both the healthy and sick.

Elderberry Syrup Cold & Flu Treatments

A placebo-controlled study on flu patients found that with a tablespoon (15 ml) of elderberry syrup taken 4x per day, “Symptoms were relieved on average 4 days earlier and use of rescue medication was significantly less in those receiving elderberry extract compared with placebo. Elderberry extract seems to offer an efficient, safe and cost-effective treatment for influenza.”

Another influenza study cooked elderberry syrup into slow-release lozenges, but administered a similar dosage 4x a day. The effects were dramatic…

“The extract-treated group showed significant improvement in most of the symptoms except 24 hours after the onset of the treatment, whereas the placebo group showed no improvement or an increase in severity of the symptoms at the same time point. By 48 hours, 9 patients (28%) in the extract-treated group were void of all symptoms, 19 patients (60%) showed relief from some symptoms… In contrast, complete recovery was not achieved by a single patient in the placebo group [during the 48 hour monitoring period].”

They concluded that “elderberry extract is safe and highly effective in treating flu‐like symptoms.”

Elderberry Syrup For the Immune System

After several studies confirmed that elderberry syrup can shorten the duration of the flu, another study tried to determine the effects of elderberry syrup on a healthy immune system. They found that a commercially available elderberry syrup (Sambucol) substantially increased immune activity, even in healthy people.

“We conclude from this study that, in addition to its antiviral properties, Sambucol Elderberry Extract and its formulations activate the healthy immune system by increasing inflammatory cytokine production. Sambucol might, therefore, be beneficial to the immune system activation and in the inflammatory process in healthy individuals or in patients with various diseases. Sambucol could also have an immunoprotective or immunostimulatory effect when administered to cancer or AIDS patients, in conjunction with chemotherapeutic or other treatments.”

Click here to read the entire article with recipe at Practical Self Reliance.

Click here to download a pdf of only Ashley’s Elderberry Syrup recipe.

Elderberry Rob

The following elderberry rob recipe comes from The Joys of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves by Linda Ziedrich.

In a saucepan combine equal volumes of elderberry juice and sugar or honey. Heat the contents over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Raise the heat to medium-high and boil the mixture to a thick syrup.

Pour the rob into sterilized bottles, and cap or cork them tightly. Store the bottles in a cool, dark, dry place, where the rob should keep for at least a year.

To use, mix a tablespoon or two in a cup of hot water and drink.

We water bath can our rob when we make it. If you use honey, the high heat of both boiling and canning probably does lose some of the health benefit of honey, in which case it is mostly just adding sweetness.

Practical Self Reliance: Pine Bark Bread

Ashley at Practical Self Reliance has written a good, long post on making bread from pine tree bark., at least in part. The ratio of wheat flour to pine bark flour is about 3.5 to 1. We live where pine trees are some of the few trees that will grow without irrigation, so I’m always on the lookout for ways that they can be used to supplement food in an emergency. Most people are aware that you can get pine nuts from appropriate species. Fewer may be aware that you can make pine needle tea which is high in vitamin C and A. Ashley documents the harvesting of the bark and bad effects on the trees themselves, grinds the bark into flour, and then makes some bad-tasting crackers and some good-tasting yeast bread.

Having the option to add pine tree bark would help in the less likely scenario where you are faced with a major TEOTWAWKI style disaster that occurs past the time that you can grow or store more wheat for the year, and you need to stretch your food reserves until foods can start growing again in the spring. Ashley also has a post How to Eat a Pine Tree for using other parts of the tree. You may just find that you like the flavor. My first taste for pine-flavored food came from drinking Retsina – an Aleppo Pine resin infused white wine – at Greek restaurants. Some can’t stand the flavor, but it goes well with some strong flavored dishes.

Bark breads are a staple of Nordic indigenous cuisine. The Sami of northern Sweden harvested pine bark and mixed it with reindeer milk in their traditional breads. Since the richest sami had the most reindeer, they’re also the ones that harvested the most pine bark. It wasn’t out of desperation, but out of a quest for flavor.

In the case of birch bark, the historical evidence is clear that the papery outer bark was used to make food storage vessels, while the nutritious inner bark was ground into birch bark flour. In the case of pine bark, the records are a bit less clear. There are some sources that say only the inner bark was used, and others that claim only the outer bark was used. Since I’ve been able to find recipes using both, I’ll share them all with you.

The outer bark of a tree is mostly there to protect the tree from the elements and doesn’t contain much in the way of calories. Calories aren’t the only reason to eat something, and pine outer bark seems to have other benefits. Pine outer bark may contain compounds that help keep food from spoiling or important nutrients that were scarce in a northern climate.

According to Nordic Food Lab, though pine outer bark is not calorie rich, it does “contain condensed tannins called procyanidins that are being researched for potential health benefits. Aromatic hydrocarbons such as terpenes and phenols which give pine its distinctive warm, woody scent also deliver antimicrobial properties, perhaps useful for blending with other flours to preserve their shelf life.”

These days, nutritional supplements are made from pine bark, and you can buy bags of powdered pine bark online which claim that “Pine Bark is used worldwide for its antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties. When used regularly, pine bark may support healthier cardiovascular and circulatory function.”

The outer bark was harvested from a section of the tree to create a “window pane” of exposed cambium. Over time, the bark slowly healed over the wound, and since the inner cambium was not harvested the tree continued to grow. Such trees could be harvested multiple times over the course of their life. There’s evidence of window panning on 700+-year-old pine trees in northern Sweden.

Obviously, if you’re going to harvest the bark of a tree, know that you are damaging the tree in a way that will impact it for hundreds of years. This particular pine tree has a partially dead top, and it’s very near our wind turbine. It’s going to be cut in the spring, so it’s a good candidate for bark harvest.

I started out using a draw knife, but it’s actually pretty difficult to use one just on the surface without really digging into the cambium. Since I only needed a small amount of pine bark flour, I was able to just use my hand to flake off chunks of shaggy exterior bark from a large pine tree growing on our land. No need to window pane a tree and cause it damage in any case.

Initially, I tried to grind the pine bark flour in a food processor, but it was in vain. The exterior bark is quite hard, but not brittle enough to fly apart. After several minutes the motor was heating up and had almost no pine bark flour to show for it. The bark, even exterior bark, needs to be dried out thoroughly before grinding.

I put the bark chips in the oven at 350 for about 45 minutes. The house smelled nice and toasty, like the warm scents of the high desert pine forests of my youth. Once the bark was toasted it ground much more easily. It would be possible to dry the bark out over a low fire in a similar way, which would make it much easier to grind by hand. When the pine bark was dried, I put it back into the food processor for grinding…