My Healthy Dish

Homemade Hand Sanitizer

During these times when you can’t even find toilet paper on the shelves, it’s important to have some resources like this Homemade Hand Sanitizer. I actually couldn’t find any hand sanitizer at the stores either so knowing how to make my own is so important right now. So with a quick google search and search in my household, I realized that I had everything I needed to make my own personal batch at home.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, there is so much focus on social distancing and hygiene, and it’s never been more important to wash your hands than ever. For those times when hand washing is not an option, let’s say after pumping some gas, hand sanitizer is the next best thing, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Hand sanitizer can come to the rescue to help kill most germs, and potentially even a virus, to help flatten the curve of spreading. But panic buying has resulted in hand sanitizer being sold out everywhere, but when you can make your own, that’s another thing you can take off of your mind.

Homemade Hand Sanitizer

Ingredients

For Homemade Hand Sanitizer, you can easily make it with 3 ingredients: rubbing alcohol, aloe vera gel, and essential oils. Rubbing alcohol, or Isopropyl Alcohol, is the most important ingredient and that’s what many people have in their first aid kit. It’s best to use 99%, but 91% will work as well. Next, look next to all your sunblock for some aloe vera gel. This simply helps to soothe the harshness of alcohol on your skin, and it helps to give a gel-like texture. Last, you can use essential oils to add a natural fragrance, but this is not essential to do. I personally like to use it, and I tried my batch with peppermint. I loved how fresh it smells and feels when using it!

Materials

Now that you have all of your ingredients for the Homemade Hand Sanitizer, gather up your materials. My recipe is for a small batch to carry in your bag or keep at your desk, so I used a travel-size liquid squirt bottle from my travel kit. You will also need measuring spoons, a container to mix in (I used my Pyrex measuring cup), a whisk or spoon, and a funnel. If you don’t have a funnel, just be careful pouring it into your container!

Homemade Hand Sanitizer

The first step is to thoroughly wash your hands with soap, because that is the MOST important step before you do ANYTHING right now. Sorry, just had to reiterate that, because you can’t make hand sanitizer with unsanitized hands. Next, clean your work surfaces and all your materials thoroughly with soap and hot water, or run it through the dishwasher. Make sure it’s all dry before you start.

Since this recipe makes a personal amount of Homemade Hand Sanitizer, you can easily increase the amount of ingredients for a larger batch. Just keep a 2:1 ratio of alcohol to aloe vera for it to be effective. I would prefer to make smaller batches since I’m hopeful that more hand sanitizer will be back on the shelves soon!

Homemade Hand Sanitizer

The important thing to remember is that washing your hands is the most effective way to sanitize your hands, but for those times when you can’t, this is the next best thing. But just as rubbing your hands during handwashing is necessary, rubbing your hands for 60 seconds with hand sanitizer is what you need to do to kill those germs as well.