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How to Safely Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer If You Can't Find It Anywhere

By Cortney Clift

Published on Jun 18, 2020

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In many parts of the country, disinfecting and sanitation products like Clorox and Purell are still scarce due to Covid-19 health concerns. While it's always safer and more effective to buy these sort of sanitation products, that's also not always possible right now. If you want to make sure you're doing everything you can to keep your hands clean during the coronavirus pandemic you may be considering creating your own hand sanitizer. This is a doable task, but doing so comes with some strict guidelines.

First, it's important to remember that hand sanitizer isn't a replacement for washing your hands. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "Soap and water work to remove all types of germs from hands, while sanitizer acts by killing certain germs on the skin."

You can use hand sanitizer after hand washing in particularly germy scenarios (public bathrooms, hospitals, etc.) as an added precaution. The CDC also recommends using hand sanitizer whenever soap and water are not readily available. For more on when to wash your hands and when to use hand sanitizer, take a look at the CDC's thorough list.

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What you’ll need:

99 percent Isopropyl alcohol: This is the most essential ingredient in hand sanitizer as it is what will kill germs and sanitize your hands. Make sure that you are using 99 percent alcohol. You will often see 70 percent isopropyl alcohol available, but when blended with the other ingredients listed here, it will not have a high enough alcohol content to be effective as a hand sanitizer. It’s crucial that hand sanitizer has a final alcohol content of at least 60 percent to work properly.
Aloe vera gel: Pure aloe is a humectant that helps to counteract the drying effects of the disinfecting alcohol and give it the gel-like feel of store-bought hand sanitizers.
Tea tree oil or an essential oil of your choice: Adding an essential oil will give your hand sanitizer a pleasant scent and may help increase its antimicrobial properties.
A bowl
A spoon or a whisk
A container for your hand sanitizer
A label and pen

The ingredients list above are easy to find and effective when formulated properly. However, this is by no means the only hand sanitizer formula available. Some formulas combine isopropyl alcohol or ethanol with hydrogen peroxide, glycerol, and boiled water. You can find details on both of these hand sanitizer recipes on the World Health Organization's website.

How to make your own hand sanitizer, step-by-step:

Before you actually get to making a formula, it's extremely important that your hands, workspace, and materials be sparkling clean, fully disinfected, and thoroughly sanitized. Wipe down the area where you'll be making the hand sanitizer with disinfecting wipes, a disinfecting spray, or a diluted bleach solution. You'll also need to wash your hands, the container you'll be storing the hand sanitizer in, and any tools you'll be using to mix the formula together (whisk, spoon, etc.) with soap and hot water.
Once you finish sanitizing your workspace, create a two-to-one ratio of 99 percent isopropyl alcohol and pure aloe vera. For example, if you use one cup of 99 percent isopropyl alcohol you will use a half-cup aloe vera gel. Add both to a clean bowl. How much you use depends on how large of a batch you want to make.
As an optional third step, you can include a few drops of an essential oil. Tea tree oil tends to be a popular choice as it contains antimicrobial properties. Essential oils of cinnamon, clove, pimento, thyme, oregano, and rosemary have also been proven to have antimicrobial benefits. When used topically, it's recommended that pure essential oils take up no more than one to two percent of a formula. That can take a bit of math to figure out. To make it easy, we recommend using this calculator to figure out how many drops you'll need to add.
Mix or whisk these three ingredients together until well-combined.
If you are transferring this formula to one or multiple bottles, make sure those have also been thoroughly cleaned and dried. Then carefully pour the hand sanitizer in and close the bottle, keeping it sealed tight.
If your hand sanitizer is in a bottle that a child or someone else in your household may mistake for a drinkable liquid, store it out of their reach and make sure it's clearly labeled. Even a small amount of isopropyl alcohol is poisonous to children.

A few final notes about homemade hand sanitizer

While making a DIY hand sanitizer recipe is not hard to do, going the homemade route comes with an element of uncertainty that can be a risk. Unless you have an alcohol meter available to test the alcohol content of the final product, you can't be entirely certain that your recipe will properly disinfect your hands. Alternatively, using too much alcohol can easily cause irritation on the skin. Homemade hand sanitizer should not be used on children’s skin as it's more sensitive and they may use the hand sanitizer improperly.

When it comes down to it, DIY hand sanitizer could be a good precaution if you can't find any ready-made formulas at your local store and you want to be extra cautious, but don't use it as a replacement for washing your hands. A thorough, 20-second hand wash with soap and warm water will always be the best way to stop the spread of germs.

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