Homemade Deodorant

 

In an attempt to reduce the cocktail of synthetic chemical I’m enticed to apply to myself I decided to give a more ‘natural’ set of chemicals a go. Chemicals are chemicals but some have been used for longer than others on humans, with no known or suspected side-effects and are a component of the world we’ve evolved in rather than something cooked up in a test tube and that has never existed in the natural world.

Step forward sodium bicarbonate, (bicarb).

A quick search of the Internet for homemade deodorant, came up with this site and I decided to give it a go. I couldn’t be doing with messing about with a 2 part product so I opted to just use the dry part.

An offer in the supermarket, (they do have their uses ), came up with corn flour, (maize flour) on promotion so I had a good supply of that and as for the bicarb well I had previously balked at paying the asking price for the little packets supermarkets sell. At that time I was sourcing bicarb for cleaning purposes and would have used half the packet in one go. I then discovered that the local animal feed suppliers had bicarb in 25 kg bags. The price comparison at the time was around 2.50€ for 400g food grade in the supermarket or 14€ for 25 kg in the feed suppliers – no contest.

The bicarb has got a little lumpy over time but a quick wiz in the liquidiser soon sorted that. It’s something I would have done anyway as one difference I noticed between this bicarb and the food grade one is that the animal one is a little coarser.

 

Then I stirred together 1 cup of bicarb with 1 cup of corn flour and a couple of drops of lavender oil and put into wide mouthed jars.

And as you can see, it makes quite a lot of powder.

I was a bit dubious about relying solely on it so started off only using it on days I was working at home.  I just use my fingers to apply it so it’s a bit dusty but no more so than talcum powder.  I was really pleasantly surprised to find it worked extremely well.  It is a deodorant not an antiperspirant so you do still sweat – essential on really hot days. 

The only thing that I could vaguely be classed as a problem is that the first batch I made, which probably had a little more corn flour in it, did leave a light yellow stain,(from the corn flour) on my underwear.  Nothing dramatic but it was there, but it washed out really easily even in a cool wash.

One unexpected side effect I’ve found is that it also seems to discourage the aoutas, (harvest mites or chiggers), and that is something worth its weight in gold as anyone who has suffered from them will tell you.