Last summer I spent an entire day at a horseshow with my shoulders out and didn’t reapply sunscreen once. By the time I got home my skin was screaming, so I did what most people would do and reached for a bottle of aloe vera gel sitting in my bathroom. It worked (thank goodness)! The redness calmed within hours and the skin underneath healed without scarring. I do have freckles though, but that’s fine.
This is the relationship most of us have with aloe vera. It lives in the bathroom, shows up after a burn, and the bottle says something reassuring like pure aloe on the front. The plant has thousands of years of medicinal use behind it and a long-earned reputation as one of the gentler healers in the materia medica.
What I want to bring to your attention today is that the word aloe on a label can point to several different preparations with profoundly different safety profiles, and the labeling system in the United States gives consumers almost no way to tell which one they’re actually b…
