Its healing powers are legendary, but we know little about how the gel works (Image: Martin Harvey/Getty)
IF YOU are looking for a celebrity to endorse a beauty product, they don’t come much bigger than Cleopatra. The Egyptian queen’s beauty regime famously included bathing in asses’ milk. But that was probably propaganda put about by her Roman enemies. So what to make of another legend? Cleopatra, the woman who seduced not one but two great Roman leaders, enhanced her charms with a skin-softening gel scooped from inside the succulent leaves of the plant we know as Aloe vera. If true, then she was an early fan of a natural product now worth an estimated $13 billion a year.
Today, the mucilaginous gel has an extraordinary range of uses – as a herbal remedy for ailments ranging from skin diseases and burns to digestive troubles, and as a soothing balm in cosmetics and toiletries, from suntan lotion and antiperspirant to detergent and even toilet paper. Increasingly, powdered gel is added as a health-boosting supplement to foods such as yogurt. It is one of the most widely used natural products in the West.
You might think that there’s little left to learn about such a familiar plant. You couldn’t be more wrong. For a start, nobody knows where it originally came from. Aloe vera has been cultivated in most warm parts of the world for so long that people often believe it has always grown there. But a truly wild population has never been found and the plant is presumed extinct in its ancestral home.
Aloe vera is extinct in the…
