The current coronavirus outbreak has caused a lot of people to make a run on hand sanitizers. Sadly, the rush has led to a shortage and plenty of empty shelves.
My family traveled to several stores over the weekend looking to restock and could not find a bottle around. What to do? For crafty people, (and even for non-crafty folks) there is an option of making your own hand sanitizer.
The trick is to make sure you use sufficient alcohol to ensure the disinfectant impact remains. There are a lot of recipes out there and circulating in social media that call for a lot of fragrant oils to mask the alcohol scent and to counter the drying effect of alcohol.
The problem with that is that it dilutes the impact. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the sanitizer has 60% alcohol content.
Commercial hand sanitizers likely have a concentration of somewhere between 60% to 90% alcohol so you have to be careful about formulas out there. I found a recipe that is basic and does the trick and contains sufficient amount of hand sanitizers
You will need:
1/3 cup Aloe Vera Gel
2/3 cup Rubbing Alcohol (Use 99% Isopropyl Alcohol)
Few drops of essential oil in the fragrance of your choice (optional)
A pump or squirt bottle
Funnel
Instructions:
Add the gel to a bowl of alcohol and stir
Stir in an essential oil if using.
Transfer to a squirt bottle or pump bottle using a funnel.
You can roll a piece of thick construction paper into a cone
Do not pour it into a spray bottle as this is a gel-like mixture.
That’s it. Toss in your purse, diaper bag, and drop one in each kid’s back pack.