"The aloe vera gel many Americans buy to soothe damaged skin contains no evidence of aloe vera at all." That is the first line of a Bloomberg News investigation by Lydia Mulvany and Zeke Faux, published in November 2016 and still circulating. Consumers had already sued over the same allegation months before it ran, and in March 2020 a federal appeals court took that allegation apart on the evidence.
The reporting was careful and the test was thin, which is not a contradiction. Bloomberg hired a lab, which asked not to be named, to run nuclear magnetic resonance, a method that identifies compounds by how they respond in a magnetic field, on four store-brand gels: Walmart's Equate Aloe After Sun Gel, Target's Up & Up Aloe Vera Gel, CVS Aftersun Aloe Vera Moisturizing Gel, and Walgreens Alcohol Free Aloe Vera Body Gel. Those are the products as tested in 2016, and nothing here describes how they are made or labeled now. Four bottles, one unnamed lab, nine years and eight months ago. Three came back without the three markers that lab used to identify aloe (acemannan, malic acid and glucose) and with maltodextrin, a cheap sugar, instead. Acemannan matters because the industry's trade body, the International Aloe Science Council, treats it as the thing worth measuring: its executive director, Jane Wilson, told Bloomberg that acemannan is thought to give the plant its beneficial properties. The Walgreens sample carried one marker of the three, which is not a partial fail. Ken Jones, a consultant who reviewed some of the tests, said it means the presence of aloe "can't be confirmed or ruled out."
Fruit of the Earth said it made the Walmart, Target and Walgreens gels and named Concentrated Aloe Corp as its supplier, on the manufacturer's own account rather than the reporting's. General counsel John Dondrea said "We've been in the business a long time and we know where the raw ingredients come from." Concentrated Aloe's president, Tim Meadows, said the method is unreliable on a finished cosmetic because other ingredients interfere, and that "Acemannan has been misinterpreted," since heavy processing can strip it from aloe that is real. James Neal-Kababick of Flora Research Labs allowed that the method is not designed to study aloe vera in cosmetics, while still reading the results as showing the plant "is not a major component." The CVS gel Bloomberg tested came from a different manufacturer, Product Quest Manufacturing, which declined to comment. The court record instead has Fruit of the Earth making the private-label gels for all four retailers, which cuts both ways: the Walmart and Target gels came from the manufacturer whose product, on discovery, was found to be made from aloe, and the testing and the case do not line up bottle for bottle. I could not reconcile the two records, and I draw nothing from the mismatch. Target declined to comment. Walmart, CVS and Walgreens said their suppliers had confirmed the products were authentic, and Bloomberg records that all five companies denied the lawsuits' allegations.
The lawsuits came first, and the allegation lost
The lawsuits were not started by the article: the earliest complaint in my files was filed on June 3, 2016, nearly six months before it ran, after separate testing, and Bloomberg reported them at the foot of the same piece. They reached discovery, the stage where each side must hand over its evidence, and that is where the allegation came apart. Scope it the way the court did: only the Fruit of the Earth and Walgreens gels were litigated on the facts, and judgment for the other retailers followed by agreement, not testing. In Beardsall v. CVS Pharmacy, decided on March 24, 2020, the Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Fruit of the Earth and Walgreens. Plaintiffs had alleged the products "did not contain any aloe vera," Judge Hamilton wrote, but "uncontested facts drawn from discovery showed these allegations to be false: the products were made from aloe vera and contained at least some acemannan." The 2016 test played no part in it: I searched the opinion, and Bloomberg is not mentioned once.
The evidence before the court did not flatter the product either. The raw aloe sold to Fruit of the Earth ran 1.01 percent acemannan by dry weight, against the 5 percent the plaintiffs' own expert said fresh aloe should carry. But that expert, the court records, "never testified that a product with lower acemannan concentration cannot fairly be described as aloe," and gave no opinion on what concentration has to do with whether the stuff works. The case failed for want of evidence, not because anyone certified the gel.
The parties agreed the products are 98 percent "aloe gel" and 2 percent stabilizers and preservatives. In a footnote setting out what plaintiffs objected to, the court records that this aloe gel is itself 1 percent dried aloe solids and 99 percent water, because the aloe is dehydrated for shipping and rehydrated at the factory, and adds that the measurement "reflects only the fact that the product uses rehydrated aloe" and that plaintiffs "do not suggest that the products are excessively diluted by the rehydration process." Take 98 percent of a component that is 1 percent solids and you get 0.98 percent, a shade under one gram of aloe solids in every 100 grams of gel.
Before anyone reads that as an exposure, it needs something to measure against. Making one kilogram of the aloe powder that goes into finished goods like gels and drinks takes 400 kilos of leaves, according to Jeff Barrie, a sales manager at raw-powder supplier AloeCorp, who was arguing to Bloomberg that competitors underselling him by half cannot be shipping real aloe. Read his interest into it: a supplier's figure for what his own product costs to make runs high if it runs anywhere, the direction that flatters the bottle here. Taken straight, that is about a quarter of a gram of powder per 100 grams of leaf, so the gel carries roughly four times the solids of the same weight of leaf. The two are not measuring the same thing, since the leaf figure loses the rinds and everything else stripped in processing, and I could not establish the solids content of fresh inner-leaf gel on its own. It is the only yardstick I have, and on it the bottle is not obviously thin. No regulator has acted, and no court has found the label deceptive.
Kaleido tested nothing here. All of it is one 2016 test on four bottles plus the expert evidence in a case that ended in 2020, and none of it establishes what is in any bottle on any shelf today.
The ingredient list ranks by weight and nothing else
What survives is the labeling problem, the part you can act on. Article 19 of the EU cosmetics regulation (OJ L 342/73) requires ingredients to run "in descending order of weight of the ingredients at the time they are added," and lets anything under 1 percent be listed in any order after that. So the order tracks weight and nothing else, and the actives, the ingredients doing the work, mostly sit below that 1 percent line where it stops meaning anything. The American rule, 21 CFR 701.3, has the same shape. Read against the court's facts, my own reading is that rehydrated aloe enters as a single ingredient and can therefore outweigh the water listed separately and take the top spot. No regulator says that in as many words, and the labels Bloomberg looked at put aloe first on some products and second after water on others, so it is not a uniform trick.
Turning the box around will not help, because the interesting claim is on the front and it is not yours to check. In Europe a claim must be "supported by adequate and verifiable evidence" under the claims regulation: verifiable by a regulator, that is, not by you in an aisle. And one question in the record is still open. The Seventh Circuit said it was "skeptical of defendants' position at oral argument that an asterisk pointing to an ingredient list in fine print could save virtually any deceptive slogan claiming purity," then said it "need not decide here whether '100% Pure Aloe Vera Gel' is ambiguous with respect to the presence of stabilizers and preservatives." That reserves the stabilizers point, not the whole purity claim, and I found nothing deciding it since.
The International Aloe Science Council's own answer is its certification seal, which the council says covers "minimum aloe vera content and labeling review." On July 29, 2026, iasc.org refused my requests with a 403, so I read the Internet Archive's copies. In the snapshot from January 16, 2026, the public list of certified products "was last updated on February 11, 2022," and where the table should sit, the page reads "(AMS Table) Discuss with Kenjie." It is a page nobody finished. What that says about the certification program itself is nothing; an unfinished page is evidence about a page. I have not put it to the council, and this piece reports only what I could read.
Nothing here can be settled in the aisle. What is left are the two numbers nobody disputes: the net weight and what it works out to per liter. Cheap soothing water is a fine thing to put on a sunburn. Buy it on unit price, which is why the big plain bottle usually wins.
