Aloe vera has been used in traditional skin and hair care for generations. Today, homemade aloe vera preparations are especially popular online, with recipes claiming that boiling fresh aloe leaves and turning the resulting liquid into an oil can make hair grow faster, stop hair loss, thicken thinning hair, and restore damaged hair.

The recipe shown in the image is simple: fresh aloe vera is prepared, heated in water, strained, and then combined with an oil to create a green homemade hair treatment.

There is a reasonable skincare idea behind using aloe vera on the scalp. Aloe gel contains compounds that can help moisturize and soothe skin, and topical aloe is generally well tolerated by many people. However, there isn’t strong clinical evidence showing that homemade aloe vera oil can stop common forms of hair loss or reliably make hair grow faster. (

That doesn’t mean the recipe is useless. It may be a pleasant conditioning treatment, particularly for a dry or irritated scalp. But it’s important to separate those potential benefits from the much stronger claim that it can cure hair loss.

What Is Aloe Vera?

Aloe vera is a succulent plant whose thick leaves contain a clear inner gel.

The leaf contains several different components, including:

Inner-leaf gel
Yellowish latex beneath the outer leaf
Outer leaf material

These aren’t interchangeable.

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health explains that aloe products can be made from the inner gel, latex, or whole leaf, and that these preparations have different properties and safety considerations. (NCCIH)

For a homemade hair treatment, the goal should be to use the clear inner gel while avoiding unnecessary exposure to the yellow latex.

Why Is Aloe Vera Popular for Hair?

Aloe vera is often used in hair routines because the gel feels:

Cooling
Moisturizing
Lightweight
Soothing
Easy to spread

A healthy scalp provides the environment in which hair follicles function.

If someone has a dry, irritated scalp, improving the condition of the scalp may make the hair feel healthier and easier to manage.

But there’s an important distinction:

Improving scalp condition isn’t the same as treating the biological cause of hair loss.

Can Aloe Vera Actually Make Hair Grow Faster?

There isn’t enough high-quality evidence to say that ordinary homemade aloe vera oil reliably accelerates human hair growth.

Aloe has been investigated for many skin-related purposes, but NCCIH notes that there isn’t enough reliable information to establish its usefulness for many conditions outside a relatively small number of studied applications.

More recent dermatology reviews also emphasize that many herbal and topical approaches for hair loss still lack sufficiently large, independent, long-term clinical trials.

So it would be inaccurate to promise: