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Make Deodorant With Me!

Hi Friends!

It's been a while, and I am still implementing and tweaking many practices with my family's zero waste routine. Recently I found that my husband's deodorant from the previous post wasn't quite up to snuff as I wanted it to be. My "Meow Meow Tweet" deodorant had been all used up, and so I was on the hunt for figuring out something that we both could use.

I was determined to find the ingredients given by Lauren Singer, in her youtube video:

The ingredients are:
2 Tbs arrowroot powder
1 Tbs baking soda
1 Tbs coconut oil
1 Tbs shea butter
a few drops of essential oil of choice
a glass bowl
a spatula
a glass jar of sorts

Baking soda is the easiest, as it can be found anywhere in a cardboard box that can be recycled. I also buy coconut oil in as large a container as possible (preferably a glass jar because glass can be easily recycled). After a year of waiting, a beautiful zero waste shop in Newtown Connecticut called "BD Provisions" opened up near me. I go there to obtain shea butter, and I brought a jar with me to put it in.

I know this is meant to be a Connecticut blog, and finding ingredients in Connecticut, but for the life of me I couldn't seem to find Arrowroot Powder in bulk in the stores. Then James and I took a trip to Canada this last summer, and visited the beautiful store called "Bulk Barn." It's every zero waster's heaven in there, with barrels of scoopable anything, including, arrowroot powder!! I brought my mason jars, and filled up two container's worth for making our deodorant. 

Now I am finally ready to make our deodorant! We tried this recipe once before as an experiment. I am here to let you know that it was a great success, and when my deodorant finished I was finding myself using the one I made for my husband. So now this has become both of our deodorants. 

The one thing I wanted to mention that I wasn't a fan of the grainy feel that the baking soda had. So this time that I had made the deodorant, I halved the baking soda, and added more arrowroot powder. So one tablespoon of baking soda that it called for, I did half a tablespoon of baking soda and half a tablespoon of arrowroot powder instead. You can adjust it to the consistency you like. You may find that the baking soda feel is fine for you, but if it isn't then know that you can adjust the amount and substitute it for more arrowroot. 



I decided to make six times what the recipe called, because I knew it worked well for us and I didn't want to make it often. I took out three jars but ended up only using two. Here are some options for you: from left to right is a small mason jam jar, a cleaned jar 
from"better than boullion," and the third jar was the empty deodorant jar I had gotten from the brand "meow meow tweet." Their deodorants were expensive to continue to buy, so I decided to make my own deodorant instead. You also see the essential oil, the baking soda, arrowroot powder, coconut oil, and the shea butter.

First we boiled a pot of about 3 cups of water. Make sure your pot is small/large enough to create your double boiler with the glass bowl on top of it. You will use the bowl and the heat of the steam to melt your ingredients together.

Next we added all the ingredients in a glass bowl except for the essential oil. 

Then we put the glass bowl on top of the boiling water, to help melt the ingredients. Use a spatula to mix it around.




We sniffed through our essential oils, and we both enjoyed the scent of citrus for our deodorant. You can choose any kind of scent that smells great to you. Lauren Singer from the video used the lemongrass essential oil. Since we multiplied the ingredients times six, we used about 24 drops.


 I didn't want to pour the whole bowl over my tiny jars, so I used a measuring cup to scoop the deodorant into the jars.

 

 It looks and smells great! I am going to use the small jar for traveling, and the large jar for our everyday deodorant needs. 

Put the warm jars of deodorant into the refrigerator to cool off and harden.

And now it is ready!!! 

Wishing you all a smelly afternoon!
Cheers!
Laura



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