This is a totally selfish post. LA has been hot as heck, and I’m basically out of all working deodorants. I’ve been testing a few I have around the house, but none are actually doing the trick. In short, I smell. Tosha, who lives by my in-laws in beautiful Midway (I’ll be there this weekend!) and whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, also has her own line called Essentially Basic. So the girl’s been cooking up recipes in her kitchen for ages and is a total pro. Enjoy!
—Name: Tosha Arnout
—Current hometown: Midway, UT
—Product name that I made up: So Fresh Deodorant
—Ingredients list: Coconut oil, beeswax, baking soda, redmond clay, tea tree oil, eucalyptus oil, and lavender oil.
—How I made It: melted the ingredients and stirred everything in
—How it smelled, felt, worked: It smelled refreshing and clean. It worked great for me, I was having a stinky problem since I had my baby boy.
Why I will or won’t do this again: I will do this again if I need it. Sometimes I don’t need deodorant, sometimes I do, crazy hormones.
Here’s the recipe!
Coconut Oil 1/2 cup
Baking Soda 3 TBS
Redmond Clay 4 TBS
Beeswax 2 TBS
Tea Tree Essential Oil 60 drops
Eucalyptus Essential Oil 60 drops
Lavender Essential Oil 15 drops
Melt coconut oil and beeswax in a double boiler. I put a 2 cup glass pyrex container in a pan of water on low
heat. Make sure the water doesn’t get in the cup.
When they are melted, stir in the remaining ingredients and remove from heat. The redmond clay is to absorb
oil. You may also use kaolin clay. Pour into old deodorant containers or something that you can push up.
This worked great. It was my third batch so I learned from my mistakes! It did eliminate body odor which I have
been struggling with since the birth of my baby boy. The first batch didn’t have enough clay so I had coconut
pit stains, pretty unattractive! Adding clay eliminated that problem.
Other essential oils to add: orange, tangerine, lime, ylang ylang and grapefruit.
Sounds amazing! Sorry there hasn’t been more Alexandra and Siobhan original content this week—there’s been a lot going on! I do have a slew of things I’m dying to write about: like my new favorite cleanser (from a girl who doesn’t even like cleansers), the world’s most amazing nail file, and of course my Why Am I Like This? I look forward to some quiet writing time in the mountains this weekend—what do you guys have planned?
’Cause mine is.
I saw this article on MSN last month because—thank you!—they were kind enough to link back to us. But I didn’t really give it a proper read until yesterday morning when I got to thinking about toothpaste.
You know how it goes with this stuff. For some reason you obsess over the chemicals in your eye cream but then dutifully ignore something else—like toothpaste, which I happen to put right in my mouth at least twice a day (since this is one area of hygiene I have not forsaken).
So what’s in conventional toothpaste? Oh, just the same stuff in that body wash I threw out eons ago. Things like triclosan, an endocrine disrupter that accumulates in nature. We talked a lot about it in the book (if you’ve read it, throw down a review, would ya?). It’s actually such a powerful “germ” killer that it was once relegated just to surgery rooms, where killing germs is, well, important. But now it’s used, oh, everywhere. It’s in anti-acne products, deodorant, antiperspirant, hand sanitizer and, yup, toothpaste.
Other nasty ingredients in toothpastes include surfactants like our old foe sodium lauryl sulfate, which is often contaminated with a carcinogen called 1,4-dioxane. And of course, there are mystery flavorings that are probably made down the hall from the synthetic fragrance we also avoid.
Meanwhile, I know many of you are way ahead of me on this. So, are you still using Crest? And if not, what’s your favorite clean alternative?
I’m a bit in love with this ominous old German Colgate ad.
Last week we shared with you Well+Good’s take on this new organic deodorant. Regular readers will know that I love Soapwalla’s deodorant cream with the zeal of a convert, but when I met Lisa Wynne Salvatore, the lovely woman behind Pure Pitz who has been in the nontoxic and organic world for 30 years, I developed an instant girl crush on her and was determined to give this puppy a shot.
Since I was almost out of Soapwalla, I decided to test drive it for about 10 days, and see how it fared for me. I’m not an especially stinky person, but it’s hot and sweaty in New York, I do a lot of yoga and I the thought of being stinky or sweatringy really, really bothers me. Here’s how it did:
First of all, I love the smell. It reminds me a little of old Aveda products (in a good way) but is made with all natural essential oils. The odor-fighting baking soda is aluminum-free (naturally!) and the plastic tube is BPA-free. Also, the tube, which is the shape of a lip balm but larger, makes application very easy, as well.
But what about the real-deal road test? It worked well to combat any odor whatsoever, but it doesn’t keep you dry at all. I wasn’t a sweaty mess by any stretch, but I did notice I simply wasn’t as dry as I am with Soapwalla. That said, I highly recommend this one for anyone who is looking to try something new. The smell is just lovely, it works, and the woman behind it is the kind of woman we can totally get behind.
It costs $13 and you can find it at some Whole Foods (check the Pure Pitz link above for exact retailers).
Have you tried it?
We’re happy to see lots of healthy discussion (and only one or two personal attacks!) in the comments after our Lavanila deodorant post. Stacy Malkan has very helpfully chimed in with her research, as did two chemists, a few vendors, and many readers as well.
I imagine a lot of us will probably be satisfied with what we’ve found so far, and my wild guess is that many will continue to use Lavanila. Which, you know…fair enough! That said, it seems like a good time to introduce my favorite new deodorant, which contains no controversial or confusing ingredients, is handmade in Brooklyn, and costs just ten bucks.
I’d heard amazing things about Soapwalla’s deodorant—which you can buy from her directly on Etsy or from Spirit Beauty Lounge—so when she sent me a sample size of it a little while ago, I was delighted. I was also, however, a little turned off by the fact that, as the name suggests, it really is a deodorant cream. Like, you apply it with your fingers, to your pits. I’m not sure why exactly this bothered me at first (fresh skin post-shower is as clean as you can get) but I got over it after a couple of weeks and readily bought a new one when my sample ran out.
Now, I am happy to report that I have converted to the stuff. I’m not sure why it works so well, but the combination of ingredients keeps me even fresher-smelling and—gasp—dryer than anything else I’ve used.
Deep breaths, very deep breaths. It appears that Julie Gabriel, a trusted clean beauty cohort, is calling out Lavanila deodorant as fake natural. Stop. The. Presses.
As many of you know, this is our go-to clean deodorant. In our tireless search for a natural one that works, Lavanila emerged as the $18 champion. But were we wrong? Is this a clear case of greenwashing, as Gabriel is claiming?
The ingredient she takes issue with is called propanediol. Lavanila says it’s derived from corn on the ingredient label, but Gabriel says it’s a petrochemical. It could be both.
So what do we think? Well, we need to do more research: So far we’ve put a call out to Lavanila as well as to Stacy Malkan from the Safe Cosmetics Database because its toxicity raring is a “1.” There is also 1,3-Propanediol which appears to be safe (at least for inhalation by rats) and 1,2-Propanediol, which may be another name for propylene glycol. Welcome to the confusing world of chemicals! We have a few more calls out to people, and we will keep you posted.
It’s also important to note that not all petrochemicals are created equal. While we don’t support their use in any products from a sustainability standpoint, not all of them are necessarily dangerous. But if Lavanila is specifically claiming not to use petrochemicals and it is, we’re gonna be pretty bummed.
We will get to the bottom of this. We’re not throwing our sweet-smelling sticks out just yet, but if the idea of petrochems near your pits is too much to bear tune in tomorrow: Siobhan will be posting about her new favorite deodorant. Look out!
