Surely you have been told more than once about aloe Vera, a plant (also known as aloe Vera) that has numerous properties and that, in turn, provides numerous benefits for our health. For example, this plant is capable of protecting and helping the skin to regenerate when you’ve been burned, removing stains, regenerating tissues, or whitening teeth. In addition, it serves to combat constipation, strengthen our immune system or even as a natural anti-inflammatory.
What more can you ask for from a plant? Therefore, having aloe Vera at home is a great option to be able to enjoy its benefits at any time in life. However, it is important that you take into account how to extract and preserve aloe Vera gel to take advantage of all its properties. Still don’t know how to do it? Peaceful! Let’s see it carefully.
Steps to extract aloe Vera gel
1 Plant
The first thing you should do is acquire an aloe Vera plant. Cultivating it will not be difficult for you, in fact it is a fairly resistant plant that does not need excessive care. You will need a temperature between 16 and 26 degrees, a pot and some soil. In addition, at the time of extraction, the plant must be mature
2 choose the leaves
The next step you should take is to carefully choose the leaves, always starting with the lowest ones. These will be the ones with the most properties to offer us since they are the ones that came out before. With the help of scissors or a porcelain knife we will make a longitudinal cut flush with the sheet to obtain it. Of course, remember to cut only the leaves that you are going to use so as not to waste product.
3 peel the leaves
The next step is to remove the tip from the top and, later, we will make a cut from top to bottom through the entire blade to be able to ‘peel’ it easily. This is how we will obtain the aloe Vera gel, although first you must take into account one more step in the process.
4 Do not forget to wash the gel well
When you carry out the third step, that of peeling the leaves, you will see below the surface a yellowish substance known as aloin. It is a molecule from the group of anthraquinones, known for their healing and toxic properties that cause intestinal motility and, if ingested, can have serious laxative effects. Therefore, it is recommended to wash the aloe vera gel well before ingesting or applying it.
Tricks to preserve aloe vera gel
- All the properties that aloe vera gel can contain are overwhelmed by the rapid oxidation that the plant has. Therefore, if you cut and extract the gel from a leaf, you will be able to compare how long it lasts without oxidizing with the time it lasts without making an apple. And this is quite little, don’t you think?
- The best advice in these cases is to try to get the most out of the blade. In other words, since you are going to cut one and use it, maximize all the uses that you can give it to your skin, as well as ingesting it or enjoying all those benefits that it brings us and that we have talked about before.
- You must bear in mind that the color of the product itself will indicate what state it is in: the darker it is, the more oxidation it will be suffering. However, there are some little tricks with which we can make aloe vera last much longer, at least much longer than it normally does.
- If you want to extend the life of the gel by 3 or 4 days, you should start by knowing the reasons for its oxidation, which is none other than excessive contact with air. Therefore, the definitive trick will be to try to isolate it as much as possible so that this does not happen. When you have used the corresponding piece, take the rest and wrap it in aluminum foil.
- In this way you will prevent it from being in contact with both air and light. Also, the best thing to do in these cases is to keep it in the fridge. Prefer to do without aluminum foil? You can crush it, add a few drops of lemon and put it in a translucent glass jar.