Homemade Deodorants for Sensitive Skins and Budgets

Is the price of your deodorant on the nose?

Control your BO and your cost of living with this simple recipe you can make at home!

The basic recipe contains only three ingredients:

1 Tablespoon Bicarbonate of Soda

2 Tablespoons Coconut Oil

3 Tablespoons Corn Flour (Cornstarch)*

* You can substitute potato starch or arrowroot powder for cornstarch.

Mix the ingredients together thoroughly and store in a small glass jar or other small container with an airtight lid.

Note that the coconut oil is often a solid at room temperature - unless the ambient temperature is an Aussie summer - but coconut oil will melt with the warmth of your hands. Ideally it should be in a mostly liquid state to ensure that the other ingredients are thoroughly blended in.

The deodorant can then be applied to your underarm using a clean finger – but remember – a small quantity goes a long way!

There are many recipes on the internet that contain various ratios of the three basic ingredients.

• The basic ratio of dry ingredients to wet ingredients in my recipe is 2:1.

• Often recipes contain equal quantities of bi carb and cornstarch.
  

• Some people get a reaction on their skin to the bicarb, as it is abrasive. Hence, my recipe contains only a 1:3 ratio of bicarb to cornstarch, rather than a ratio of 1:1.
  

• If you are still finding that the deodorant irritates your skin, you can further reduce the quantity of bicarb and increase the corn flour in the recipe by the same amount (or even replace all of the bicarb in the recipe with just corn flour). However, mixtures that contain some bicarb do work better due to the odour neutralising properties of bicarb.

Experiment with the recipe by making small quantity batches until you find something that you are happy with. This will limit the wastage from discarded batches if the first couple don’t work out. Don’t make a large batch until you are confident that you have perfected the recipe for your personal needs.

Not only is this deodorant cheap to make, it also won’t go off – it doesn’t require refrigeration and is shelf stable indefinitely.

You can use the basic deodorant on it’s own without any additives, or you can add a few drops of essential oils of your choice.

I always have the three basic ingredients in this recipe on hand as they are staples in my household, but they can all be purchased from any supermarket and both bicarb and corn flour are also usually available in the supermarkets’ own generic brands.

Even if you don’t purchase the lowest cost, generically branded ingredients, the unit cost of making a small batch of deodorant according to the above recipe is mere cents – much cheaper than commercial deodorants.