Aloe vera is most often grown indoors in pots because it is particularly susceptible to frost. A constant, year-round, warm, moist climate is essential for the aloe vera plant to survive. It isn’t a really pretty house plant, but a great many people have large pots of aloe vera in their homes not for its beauty, but for its medicinal properties. The aloe vera plant looks like grass on steroids. The blades are long, narrow, and dark green. On each side of a blade, there are small spikes.


Inside each long, dark-green blade, there is a gel that has long been used as medicine. The aloe vera plant has been used by many cultures for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Indians, and the Chinese have all used aloe vera. The Egyptian queens Nerfertiti and Cleopatra used it as part of their regular beauty regimens.

Aloe vera is endowed with such wonderful medicinal properties that over the years it has been given some rather interesting and colorful names such as; Burn Plant, Medicine Plant, Wand of Heaven, and Plant of Life.

The best way to use aloe vera is to remove a leaf from a plant, fillet it, and apply the gel to the affected area; but that isn’t always practical. Aloe vera is used in a great many over-the-counter medications that you can find on the shelves of your local pharmacy, grocery store, or discount pharmacy and at thousands of sites on the Internet.

Aloe vera is used in products to treat all kinds of skin irritations, including acne, eczema, and psoriasis, among others. (Aloe vera is also used internally to treat digestive and bowel problems as well, and it was first used as a laxative.)