Homemade Hand Sanitizer

In our family, we used to use too much hand sanitizer, too often. When you're a SAHM with young children, trying to keep them clean and prevent illness, getting everyone to wash so often can be difficult. So I ended up resorting to hand sanitizer more often than I should have. Finally, the nagging doubts and concern got to me, and as I researched more (click here to learn why sanitizer is bad), I decided we were done with the stuff, except for the occasional exception.

But we needed a replacement for those times when we are at the park, in the car, have been in a public place, etc, and still need to get rid of germs. I found lots of recipes for homemade sanitizer (noordinaryhomestad.com, doterralife.wordpress.com, onegoodthingbyjillee.com, natural-supermom.com, doterraforyourlife.blogspot.com) which started the wheels turning in my head. My whole purpose in wanting to make my own was to get away from alcohol-based products, yet some of these recipes call for it (or witch hazel, which contains alcohol) as a main ingredient. I ended up making a couple batches of a solution that used pure aloe vera gel, fractionated coconut oil, and essential oils. The pros for this recipe were: It smelled way better than commercial hand sanitizer, didn't contain any petrochemicals, and moisturized the hands without being sticky or oily. The cons were: Pure aloe vera gel is way too expensive to use like this all the time. So I moved on to the next phase of my experiment.

When this homemade hand sanitizer was gone, we all just had to wash with soap and water more, which is ideal anyway. And as it turned out, the easy answer for a substitute was the best one: OnGuard spray. I wrote last month about the virtues of the OnGuard essential oils blend and how I have been using OnGuard in a bottle of water (shake before each use) to spray on all germy surfaces once a week. I was also already using it before snack time on the children in my church's nursery each Sunday. And after my research showed that nothing else is more effective, I wondered why I had waited so long. Now I have a pretty little blue glass spray bottle filled with water and a few drops of OnGuard that I keep in my purse for when we need it. I love how it smells, how well it cleans and disinfects, and knowing that it's good for ingestion and boosting immunity. I also love the fact that each drop is only 13 cents--making my bottle of homemade "sanitizer" less than $1.