We have an abundance of Aloe Vera growing on our property (this is only part of one of three patches). Which is very fortunate for what’s been going on with my skin these days. Yes, I’m aging and there’s not much what I can do about it, but being sick so often has kind of edged some lines that I hope are not permanent. Also, I’m losing weight and while that is not going as fast as I’d like, I can see some sagging skin happening and I want to at least try to help my skin to tighten up.
Aloe is so wonderful in itself, you don’t really need to do much to use it. I always have pieces of it (taking only half of the skin off) in the freezer for burns, insect bites and other incidents that might need aloe.
This time I took the skin off completely, after letting it drip out. The brownish stuff is very laxative and can be used medicinally, but I usually just rinse it out of the container it leaked into. I cut off the spikes, used a knife to slice off the flat part of the skin and a spoon to scoop the gel out of the curved part.
The first time, I used a food processor to make it more liquid. I read that you shouldn’t proces it too long – the more air you get into it, the faster it goes bad. I was too careful though, there were quite a lot of lumps left. It lasted over a week. I used it up before it went bad.
The second time I used my juicer and that worked even better. No lumps at all and it also lasted over a week.
I kind of fell of the bandwagon using it when we went to the Netherlands, but I did notice some improvement before we left, so I made a new batch this weekend. Let’s see if we can get that skin a little bit tighter…