DIY : hand sanitizer

5 March 2020 Body Délice

After our first DIY project (make your own laundry powder) we now give you a recipe to make your homemade hand sanitizer!

Coronavirus Health Crisis

In January 2020, a Coronavirus outbreak started in China.

Today, 95,120 people are infected worldwide and the virus keeps spreading.

This map (updated regularly by the data shared by the OMS and the CDC) gives a great and accurate overview of the situation.

Due to this new health crisis, people are advised to take stronger sanitary measures as virus needs a host (meaning living cells) to reproduce. That’s why, it’s recommended to not rub your eyes nor touch your mouth if your hands are not clean, to regularly wash your hands with soap and water, avoid any hand-shaking and use hand sanitizer.

As a direct consequence, supermarkets are running out of hand sanitizers as people rush to protect themselves from Covid-19.

If you arrived too late to stock your hand sanitizer, no worries, you can still make your own hand sanitizer !

Recipe : make your own hand sanitizer

Here’s a quick recipe you can use:

1oz of aloe vera gel
0.35oz of 91% Alcohol (you can find that at your CVS for example)
10 drops of Lavender essential oil
10 drops of Tea tree essential oil

And that’s it!

Stir it in a bowl and put it in a container.

Wanna try?

By the way, did you know…

Hand sanitizer is not new. It was patented in 1966 by Lupe Hernandez, a student nurse in Bakersfield, California. She imagined an alcohol-based gel to clean hands in the absence of handwashing facilities.

However, its public use did not start until 2009, with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic.

Hand Sanitizer vs. Hand Soap and Water

The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) recommends that hand sanitizers should be used in addition to soap and water. So let’s be clear here, it does not aim to replace proper cleansing procedures with soap and water.

Of course, hand sanitizers are a perfect waterless solution which can be conveniently used everywhere when soap and water are not available. Just remember to also wash your hands with soap and water as soon as you can in order to properly kill germs and remove dirt that could be harmful !