It was recently brought to my attention that my anti-perspirant is toxic because it contains aluminum. Until then, I was blissfully ignorant of the hazardous nature of this metal. Apparently, the aluminum is added because it clogs the sweat pores and thus prevents you from pouring forth the smelly stuff. So why is aluminum bad? It's linked to Alzheimer's disease and cancer. When I found out about it's link to the former, alarm bells started going off loud and strong. I have been using this stuff for some time and I know that my memory is woefully bad. I immediately threw out the anti-perspirant sticks and thus began my quest for a non-toxic formulation of chemicals that would not make me smell bad.
My desire to ensure that body odor does not invade the olfactory senses of the general public is rooted in years of suffering constant invasion of mine in crowded buses in a South Indian city where summer temperatures soar well above three digits F. This was further solidified when I came to the USA as a graduate student and had to suffer lab mates that smelled bad. Smell is something that one has very little control over - if something looks bad, one can look away, avoid seeing it. If something sounds bad, like music you don't like, it's socially acceptable to say that you don't like it. If something tastes bad - well you get my drift. However, if someone you have to be around smells bad, what can you do? You can't stop breathing. Nor can you gift them anti-perspirant. Anyways, I digress.
Since, I threw out my anti-perspirant, I needed something I could find around the house till I found a non-toxic thing that would keep me smelling good. I turned to that age old white substance called powder. While powder is OK for the first few hours, it didn't work very well for me for an entire day. And, God help me, talc is also bad for you (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Safety).
After doing a lot of research, I found out that there are two things that you can use to keep body odor at bay long term - anti-perspirants (that contain aluminum) and deodarants that may not contain aluminum. Now, I did not know the technical definition of these products. Apparently, anti-perspirants block sweat pores and prevent you from sweating, while deodorants allow you to sweat but supposedly contain stuff that kill the odor causing bacteria in your body fluid. So now, my search was narrowed down to deodorants. I quickly found out that my all purpose store Target, did not seem to have any choices for deodorants. Google came to the rescue as always. I found out that health food stores are a good place to look for deodorants. So off I went to my neighborhood Trader Joe's and I found two varieties of aluminum free deodorants - one was scented and the other was unscented. I picked the Trader Joes brand of uncented deodorant - for no particular reason. Uncented deodorant is a first for me (a friend of mine was quite surprised at the concept) but it does have its advantages - I can now use my perfumes that have been hibernating because I did not want two different scents to fight each other during my scented anti-perspirant days. I will enjoy them until I find out that they contain carcinogenic, brain-numbing chemicals ... I have been feeling rather woozy lately ....
7 years ago
