An open letter from an environmental engineer
“It Was Never Your Skin.” — Why Almost Every ‘Natural’ Deodorant You’ve Tried Burned, Quit, or Ended Up in a Drawer
After 14 years formulating deodorant in Montréal, I can tell you the two reasons they fail — and the baking-soda-free mineral spray I built to finally end the search.
I need to say something a beauty brand isn’t supposed to say:
Most natural deodorants deserve the bad reputation they have.
I should know. Before I ever made my own, I tried them — the “clean” ones, the “aluminum-free” ones, the ones with the beautiful minimalist labels and the founder stories. Some burned. One left me red and raw for the better part of two weeks. Most simply gave up by lunch.
For years I assumed the problem was me — my body, my “difficult” skin. I’m an environmental engineer; I spent 25 years cleaning contaminated soil and water and reading ingredient data for a living. And even I blamed myself.
It wasn’t me. And it almost certainly wasn’t you — or whoever you’re trying to find one for: a partner who’s given up, a teenager whose body is suddenly changing, a friend who keeps a graveyard of half-used bottles under the sink.
The drawer that breaks my heart
In 14 years of doing this, customers have shown me the same thing more times than I can count: a bathroom drawer with eight, nine, ten half-used deodorants in it. A small graveyard of hope and disappointment. Sticks that rashed. Sprays that clogged. “Naturals” that smelled fine at 8 a.m. and surrendered by noon.
Every one of those drawers tells the same story: someone who wanted to make the switch, tried hard, and was let down by the products — not by themselves. So let me tell you what’s actually going on, as an engineer, not a marketer.
Reason 1 — It was the baking soda
Open the deodorant that burned you and read the ingredients. If you see sodium bicarbonate — baking soda — that is almost certainly what did it.
Here is the chemistry the front of the package never mentions. Baking soda sits at around pH 9. Your skin’s protective barrier — the acid mantle — lives around pH 4.5–5.5. Apply a pH-9 powder to that barrier every single day and you disrupt it. That’s the burning, the redness, and for a lot of people, the darkening under the arms. It is the single most documented complaint about natural deodorant.
And it’s still in most of the big “natural” brands on the shelf — because baking soda is cheap, and it does control odour. It just does it at the expense of your skin.
It was never that your skin “can’t handle natural.” It was one ingredient that should never have been there.
Reason 2 — You quit during week two (and that wasn’t your fault either)
Here’s the part almost nobody explains before you switch. A conventional antiperspirant works by plugging your sweat glands shut with aluminum chlorohydrate. Over years of use, the bacteria on your skin adapt to that suppressed environment.
When you stop and switch to a real deodorant, your glands “wake up” — and for about one to two weeks, odour can spike worse than before while your skin rebalances. Most people quit right there, in week two, the single worst week, convinced natural “doesn’t work on them.”
The antiperspirant didn’t protect you. It made you dependent. And then the natural deodorant took the blame for the withdrawal.
As an engineer, this is the part that made me angry
Have you ever stopped to ask why we all started plugging our pores with aluminum in the first place?
It wasn’t science. It was an ad.
In 1919, an advertising man named James Webb Young had to sell a failing product called Odorono — an antiperspirant first invented to keep surgeons’ hands dry. So he wrote an ad telling women that body odour was a shameful secret their friends were too polite to mention. He called it “Within the Curve of a Woman’s Arm.” Sales jumped more than 100%.
An entire category — and a hundred years of daily shame — was built on a single piece of fear-based advertising. The American Medical Association had already called the original formula “fraudulent and dangerous.” It didn’t matter. The fear sold.
So here’s where that leaves us. A century later, most of us still apply an aluminum compound to our skin every single day — and then blame our own bodies when the “natural” alternatives don’t work. The shame was manufactured. The dependency was manufactured. And the rash from the cheap baking-soda “naturals” was the final insult.
I’m not here to make you panic. I’m an engineer — I don’t do panic. I’m here to ask you to pause and notice the whole thing was sold to you on fear. You’re allowed to opt out.
The math nobody adds up
Between the rashes and the noon failures, the average person who finally writes to me has cycled through somewhere between three and a dozen brands. Quietly, that adds up:
The money stings. But the worse cost is giving up on something that genuinely works — because the first few attempts were built badly.
So I built the one I couldn’t find
In 2010, in my kitchen in Montréal, I started formulating the deodorant I wished existed. Not a startup’s first guess — a formula built to the standard I’d use in my actual profession. I tested every version on myself, then on my own family. I reformulated until it was right.
It comes down to three things I refused to compromise on:
1. No baking soda. Odour is controlled with potassium alum — a natural mineral salt that forms an invisible layer on the skin and neutralizes odour-causing bacteria. It stays on the surface; it is molecularly different from the aluminum chlorohydrate in antiperspirants, and it does not plug your pores.
2. A spray, done properly. A spray is the format most people actually want — and the one most brands butcher: broken nozzles, uneven mist, up to 40% of the bottle left stuck and unusable. I engineered ours to deliver the full can in a fine, even mist — no dragging a stick over freshly shaved skin, no clogged applicator, no chalky residue. It dries in 15–30 seconds and leaves no white marks on dark clothes.
3. Fourteen years, still made by hand. Backed by magnesium chloride, aloe and witch hazel to keep skin calm, ECOCERT-certified, and unchanged since 2010. I still make it the same way I started: by hand, in small batches, here in Montréal — not stamped out by the million in some overseas plant.
And about the sweat
One thing I want to be honest about, because the whole category lies about it: a mineral deodorant is not an antiperspirant. It will not plug your glands, and it shouldn’t.
Sweating is a feature, not a flaw. Your body is supposed to do it. The problem was never the sweat itself — it’s the bacteria that feed on it. That is exactly what the mineral formula targets, while your pores stay open and your skin stays balanced.
I’m not the only one who stopped searching
14 years in, the formula sits at 4.8 stars across 227 verified reviews. A few, in their own words:
Two paths from here
Keep searching
Finish the search
What to do next
Here’s the honest part: there’s no fake countdown on this page. But there’s no warehouse full of this, either. Because I make it by hand in small Montréal batches, popular scents do sell out between runs — and when one’s gone, it’s gone until the next batch is ready. If the scent you want is in stock today, that’s the moment to take it. Every week you spend “deciding” is another rash you didn’t deserve and another half-used bottle headed for the drawer. Don’t close this tab and tell yourself you’ll order later — “later” is how the drawer filled up.
Start your switch — get the 3-Pack →P.S. — If a “natural” deodorant has ever burned someone you love, the kindest thing you can do is tell them to read one line on the label: sodium bicarbonate. That one ingredient explains most of the rashes the whole category gets blamed for.
P.P.S. — This is the only deodorant I’ve sold in 14 years, because it’s the only one I needed to make. I still spray it on every morning, and I still put it on my kids. That’s the whole standard. — Diana