Making luxurious homemade soap is surprisingly simple, and with a few economical ingredients and Mar Gómez's guidance in "The Best Natural Homemade Soaps," you can learn how to make 40 different herbal soaps with a wide variety of benefits and uses. Cover courtesy Robert Rose

You can take advantage of aloe vera's stellar healing qualities by making aloe vera soap. Photo courtesy Robert Rose

In The Best Natural Homemade Soaps (Robert Rose, 2014), Mar Gómez offers 40 recipes for simple, luxurious soaps based on three essential ingredients: water, olive oil and caustic soda. Gómez adds a number of natural ingredients like beeswax, cocoa butter, essential oils and herbal infusions to help you customize a soap that’s perfect for you, and each soap recipe is introduced with the history and therapeutic uses of the distinctive ingredient. The following recipe is for aloe vera soap.

Aloe vera is a succulent plant of the Xanthorrhoeaceae family, which grows in the deserts of southern Africa.

Aloin is extracted by squeezing the plant’s spiked cactus-type leaves. This greenish-yellow liquid is used to induce vomiting and should not be consumed. However, it has extraordinary virtues if used topically on the skin. For this soap, you will only need 1 to 2 tbsp.

Aloe can be used as an energy food, but in that case the dermis and epidermis of the leaves must be discarded (they contain the bulk of the aloin and other irritating substances) and the pulp must be washed carefully. For aloe vera soap, the opposite is true. If we want the aloe to yield its therapeutic properties, its juices must contain aloin. Simply squeeze the leaves to extract the juice.

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Aloe vera has so many healthy properties that it is almost impossible to list them all: it is anti-infective, anti-inflammatory and soothing on cuts and burns; it promotes healing; it regenerates the skin; and it soothes and heals wounds, bruises, muscle or joint pain, acne, skin blemishes, and so on.

The word aloe comes from Arabic and means “shining bitter substance,” while the word vera is Latin for “true.” The Egyptians and Sumerians used it in their day, and now there are many varieties grown in places far and wide.