Crazy grooming product replacements: Deodorant and toothpaste

As earlier promised, here's my post on deodorant and the like. Sorry it's taken so long and I'm not so sure how great this post is going to be. Daylight savings time really seems to have my clock messed up. Well that and we've been doing some major life debating combined with a sick kid and now today I think Braelen is sick. He's walking around the house carrying a bucket, his idea. Which is cute, but gross.

Anyway, on to the task at hand!

After the birth of Braelen I started some research on what products are safe to use while breastfeeding (which is another rant for the future). It seems as though it really is just hard as fuck for companies to go ahead and test things before using humans for lab rats. Not that it's been proven for sure, but there have been links between using underarm deodorant and breast cancer rates. The National Cancer Institute does state that aluminum and other ingredients found in deodorant can cause cancer. HMM. Obviously what our skin absorbs can enter the breastmilk and I wanted to give my children the least amount of chemicals I could.

Enter: Natural deodorants. No offense to these products, but they kind of suck. Really, I heard bad things about them and most of the bad things were true. The only thing DH and I found that worked for a while was a product called Happy Pits we purchased on Etsy (J did have some good luck for a while with Crystal also). I haven't been able to find it anymore lately, so I'm not sure what happened to it on Etsy. It doesn't matter though, because like many non-natural products, the deodorant worked for awhile but then stopped working. Since I refused to stink I did end up just using normal deodorant while breastfeeding my kids. This was after trying multiple natural deodorants.

Fast forward to now, as I was browsing Vegweb, a great free source for vegan recipes, I happened to stubble upon non-food recipes. One of them was deodorant. I stumbled upon a great, simple recipe for deodorant that really has worked well for us. Will it continue to work for the many years J and I will live? I don't know, I hope so. If it doesn't, at least it worked for this while and is crazy cheap and crazy effective, and a crazy small list of ingredients. Enter...drumroll please..............

BAKING SODA!!

Yep, good ole baking soda again. Are we sensing a pattern? Wash our hair with baking soda, now we put it on our bodies to eliminate stink. Turns out that if baking soda can help your fridge eliminate that stinky onion smell that it can help your body too. After showering we put 1/8 tsp baking soda in the palm of our cupped hand and add 1/4 tsp of water. I use a fingertip to mix the two in the cup of my hand then rub my hands together and then rub underarms. Pretty darn simple. This is just a beginner recipe and you can customize it to your body. For example, when I first started I needed to add just a touch (I mean minuscule) more water because I had a slight rash because it dried out my underarms too much. Problem fully fixed. J and I both use this now and it works much better than deodorant ever worked. Plus, I hate all that fake scented crap (example, I hate it when babies smell like johnson and johnson, I want them to smell like them). Now we just smell like us instead of the "sport" scent, etc. Believe me, it's much more pleasant. However, if you still like a touch of scent add your favorite essential oil to the mix. I've tried lavender but like to smell like me more.  I also use a touch less baking soda after shaving, add a touch of olive oil (a good moisturizer) and put it only right in the pit, not really over to my arm if that makes sense, just in case my armpits are a bit sensitive. Really, customize this to what your body needs and wants.

Just in case you haven't gotten sick of hearing it yet, we also use baking soda as toothpaste now. DH gets a lot of painful canker sores and we read somewhere that something in most toothpastes can cause that. When I found out that baking soda and salt (salt is optional, it's only there to enhance scrubbiness which I feel is unneeded) can be used to brush teeth we decided to try it. Again, baking soda both cleans and deodorizes. We wash hands, put small amount of soda in cupped palm (J adds salt, I don't b/c I feel it's scrubby enough), wet toothbrush, scoop up soda, brush. I brush soft because my toothbrush seems more scrubby without toothpaste. We don't have "minty" breath, but it doesn't stink either. It doesn't really smell like anything. Good job baking soda for deodorizing. :) My teeth also feel cleaner all day. Yeah, it tastes a bit funky at first, but we got used to it and it's fine now. Now instead of putting something in my mouth with a warning to call poison control if children ingest it, I use something that is often used in baking.

Look at our huge baking soda and olive oil!

Note: I have also seen that baking soda can be combined with peroxide to make toothpaste. Have not tried that yet and don't know exact ratios, but may in the future, not sure. For now this works well for us.



Well, that's it for today folks. Keep in mind that these things are just what has worked for our family. We find it more natural, more economical, and feel better about putting less bad things in our bodies. Till next time!