DIY – Making Homemade Deodorant Posted on July 24th, 2009
If you want natural, chemical-free armpits, you have three choices: shower two or three times a day, stink and hope no one notices, or make your own deodorant.
Luckily, you don’t have to waste water or lose your social life because making your own deodorant is actually pretty easy. It’s cheap, doesn’t take a lot of ingredients, and is even more cost effective than the bourbon that your uncle from the 1980s wore as cologne. Remember him?
Here’s the stuff you’ll need:
- Corn starch
- Baking soda
- Coconut or aloe oil
- A small or medium-sized mixing bowl
- A container for the finished product (more on this later)
- Optional scents (essential oils or additives)
You can skip the essential oils, but a few of them are useful as anti-bacterial/microbials for further scent control. Your stinkiness primarily comes from bacteria growing in your sweat and belching out stink. Good oils for anti-microbial are bay, cinnamon, clove, and thyme. Make sure you aren’t sensitive to these, since they can cause a rash if you are. They’re optional, so if you have a problem, skip them or use something else.
Other nice scents are aloe, mint, vanilla, and rose oil. Go easy on these, since their essentials are extremely potent. Lighter scents like lemon oils, sandalwood, and others are also nice.
Now for the mixing. Use a bowl large enough to hold at least three cups. You can scale this recipe up or down to taste, but mind the scents as they can get tricky when you do that. Too little is way better than too much, but you can always scale up without extra scent to dilute it, I guess.
Mix: 1/2 cup of corn starch and 1/2 cup of baking soda. Sift or stir well to blend them together into a seamless powder. Ad four tablespoons of coconut or aloe oil.
Depending on the consistency of your oil, ad more powders (evenly mixed) or oil to make a dry mush. You’re trying for the consistency of store-bought deodorant sticks here. Use your bare hand or a spoon or fork. Once you have the consistency you want, dribble in your scent.
Mix again and then put into your dispensing container. This can be an old deodorant store-bought “stick”, a petri-style dish, Tupperware, whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be “sealed,” but doing so preserves the scent. You can spread it on with a stick, spackle it on with your fingers, rub it on with a cloth, or whatever. Choose a container that you’ll use, though.
Then let it sit for a day or two to “settle” and solidify a little. It will “flake” off a little when you apply, which is exactly what you want. It should hold up in most normal temperature ranges, but if your area gets very hot, you’ll probably want to use a thicker coconut oil with a higher melt-off temperature.
If you have a real stink problem and normal stick deodorants don’t cut it for you, then you’ll have to take it up a notch. Remember back when I talked about vinegar and how you could use it to de-stink your feet?
Well, it works everywhere else too. So you can soak a rag or cloth in vinegar, compress it under your armpit (just put the cloth under there and hold your arm down) and watch TV or read a book for a while. Then rinse or clean yourself off. Do this every 2-3 days and you won’t have much stink (if any) at all.
This works the same way it does on your feet, but can leave a residual vinegary smell. It’s not usually bad, though. Here’s how the vinegar trick works (on feet, pits, butt, whatever you try it on):
The vinegar soaks into your skin and pores, killing microbials and things that have too many arms under a microscope. The residual vinegar hangs around for a while, continuing it’s commando action against the stink-making bacteria. Since the bacteria are what makes the stink…
There ya go. If you have sensitive skin, you’ll want to test this on a small area before you go whole hog with the vinegar, but it’s pretty rare that someone’s skin is that sensitive.
Who said being a tree huggin’ hippie freak meant you had to stink like a caveman?!
Related posts:
- Natural Remedies for Sunburn Relief
- Natural Skin Care and Stretch Mark Remedies
- Natural Sunscreen Options – Alternatives to Crazy Chemicals
