Mar 12, 2020 3 min read

This week, I turned the kitchen into a virus-fighting laboratory. Having come up short in my quest for hand sanitizer, I decided to make my own.

The recipe is simple: 2/3 cup rubbing alcohol, plus 1/3 cup aloe vera gel and a few drops of essential oil – the formula offered by a television doctor.

“My 7-year-old daughter makes it,” she said, suggesting this is easy.

But finding the ingredients would not be so easy.

Much of the rubbing alcohol was snapped up early in the crisis. “Go to the liquor store,” said the Facebook people, but I was not so sure vodka was the answer. Three stores into my search, I found the alcohol. A dollar store had little plastic containers and large pump bottles.

The aloe vera gel was another matter.

Now, I’ve seen bottles of that on store shelves all my life and, except for the few times I bought it to soothe a sunburn, I’ve breezed on by. There were no bottles of aloe vera gel in the lotions aisle, nor were there empty shelves where it used to be. Had I imagined seeing it recently?

Amazon had it, of course, at $6 a jar, apparently from a vendor who was either unaware of the coming demand for home-cooked sanitizer or from one who was not inclined to gouge.

A day later the gel arrived at my door. I ripped into the box, rolled up my sleeves and starting concocting. There was something relaxing and satisfying about scooping handfuls of the gel out of the tub and then plopping it into the mixing bowl. “Glug, glug” went the alcohol into the bowl, making a crater as it landed on the gel. Ten drops of lime essential oil, and then it was time to stir. An egg whisk seemed to be the right tool. But as I whisked, I realized that the end result of all this work would not be something that looked or felt like Purell.

A scientific rule was at play in that bowl, a law of physics or chemistry that says gel and alcohol do not mix – just as drugs and alcohol do not mix and oil and vinegar do not mix. What I had was something that looked like lumpy salad dressing and smelled like the doctor’s office.

The stuff would not stay mixed. The aloe gel is intended to be an emulsifier, but this stuff refused to hang together. The gel and the alcohol were social distancing.

But I wasn’t going to waste all that germ-killing alcohol. Before pouring the goo into bottles, I gave it a try on my hands. It doesn’t dry as fast as the store-bought kind, and it’s a bit sticky. I put a little bottle of it in my purse, and will put the big pump bottle on my desk at work.

My coworker has always kept a big, glass jar of candy on her desk; she welcomes visitors to reach in for a little candy bar when they stop by. Lately there’s been a giant pump bottle of Purell on that corner of her desk, too. I wonder if it’s the candy that people are stopping by for anymore.

She told me she could sell that bottle for a fortune. She was joking, of course, but she was right. Hucksters on the internet are offering Purell for hundreds of dollars a bottle

I made a quart of my home blend for about $24. It’s not the same, but these days, it’s good enough.