Baking Soda As a Deodorant!

You realize that your pits reek like old onions, and it's time to head off to the store. 

Or work. 

Or a date.  The list goes on.  We've all been there at one time or another.


It doesn't matter where exactly you're going.  All that matters is that you smell really, really bad, and you need to fix it.  Naturally, you reach for the deodorant.  You feel relief momentarily wash over you, but then you realize...

Now you smell like "spring rain"

...and old onions.  Ugh.

You rush to grab a washcloth and soap to take care of the problem.  Finally, you're clean.  You use the deodorant so that you can smell like fresh spring rain, and race for the door.

All the extra time you took caused you to be late.  Now you're stressed to the max... but at least you don't smell like old onions.

Now let's start over.  This time, instead of reaching for the deodorant that really smells nothing like real spring rain, you reach instead for...

Yep.  Simple, boring, inexpensive baking soda.  Crazy?  Not really.  Not at all, actually.

For the past six months, baking soda has been my deodorant of choice.  No, it doesn't have any of those pretty scents that people crave, but are they really necessary?  Realistically, you can always use perfumes, colognes, or oils if you want that nice smell attached to you. 

Unlike your average deodorant, baking soda actually neutralizes the stinky bacterium that breeds under your arms, causing that nasty onion smell, while allowing 'good' bacteria to prosper.  That's why people shove it into their refrigerators and behind their trash cans, after all.

 It has no harmful ingredients.  Baking soda is composed of a single ingredient: Sodium bicarbonate, a salt.  Granted, if you have any shaving burns under your arms it'll sting, so you want to be careful about that, but otherwise it's harmless... unlike standard deodorant, which in many cases contains aluminum compounds, as well as propylene glycol, a neurotoxin.

I mentioned it's cheap.  Baking soda costs about a dollar.  If you buy a kabuki brush like I did, so that you have an easy application method, you spend a few dollars more, but that's a onetime cost.  Standard deodorants, on the other hand, range from a couple of dollars to almost ten dollars.  And you spend that amount more than once a year.

Furthermore, there have been days that I've totally forgotten to use it in the morning, and didn't realize it until hours later.  Why?  Because I didn't stink.  At all.  I'm not entirely sure why that's the case, but I believe it has to do with the fact that I'm not absorbing toxins into my skin that the deodorants I used to use were happy to supply me with.

Now, I'm not claiming that all deodorants are bad.  I'm simply pointing out that baking soda is better.  I went from applying deodorant two or three times per day, because I really needed it, to using baking soda only once per day, and sometimes forgetting to do even that.

I'll never go back to standard deodorants.  Ever!