Homemade deodorant with cocoa butter and coconut oil

Finally!

Finally, I got rid of all of my store-bought deodorants. 

I make my own body lotions, scrubs and face creams so, I asked myself, why haven’t I made a deodorant yet 🙂

For years I’ve been using Tom’s because it does not have Aluminum in it which:

has been linked to breast cancer in women and has also been linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Then I discovered that the main ingredient in Tom’s is propylene glycol. Weirdly enough reading about it I discovered a quote: 

The Material Safety Data Sheet warns users to avoid skin contact with propylene glycol as this strong skin irritant can cause liver abnormalities and kidney damage.

to read more about it check out “related articles” on the bottom of this post

Since that day I barely would use a deodorant but that isn’t working for me. At the same time, I’m not willing to pay $7 for a 2.5 oz. of organic deodorant.

So, while still using my old deodorant I’ve looked for homemade deodorants on the Internet. I have pinned a few recipes I found. Finally, when the time to make it had come, I looked at all of them. In almost all cases I lacked one or two ingredients.  The easiest recipe made of ingredients I already had in my pantry was from How About Orange. Having that recipe and the one from Angry Chicken blog as a base I came up with something that would, kind of, combine both.

This is what I ended up with:

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp. cocoa butter

2 Tbsp. coconut oil

2 oz. baking soda

1.5 oz arrowroot (or cornstarch)

4 capsules vitamin E

10 drops essential oil (your choice)

Directions:

Melt cocoa butter with coconut oil over double bath until combined and there is no cocoa butter pieces remaining and it looks like that:

Wait until the mixture is cool and add baking soda, arrowroot, essential oil. Poke a small hole in vitamins E capsules and squeeze the content to the mixture. Mix it well until everything is well combined.

At this point, the mixture won’t be very thick. It will get there, don’t worry. You need to stir it from time to time and, if you impatient like me, put it in the fridge for 10 minutes.

In my case, after those 10 minutes in the fridge, my mixture got very hard. Definitely, it wasn’t a consistency I was hoping for. I let it sit in a room temperature for 10 minutes and after that, it got soft again, a little bit too soft. I figured it out that the temperature in my kitchen (as I was baking and cooking at the same time) might be too high for the coconut oil to get thick again. So I moved the jar to my bathroom where the temperature is much lower. That did the trick. My deodorant set perfectly. The consistency is thick-soft. I can use my finger to apply it on the skin without any problems.

To store it I used jar after Fleischmann’s dry yeast (4 oz.). From this recipe, I filled that jar to about 3/4.

Not bad!

So far I really like it. It works way better than Tom’s and I use a tiny bit on my skin. It seems like that jar will last for a long long time.

I’ve been using it for a few days now and I have to say that the results are beyond my expectations. It smells nice. It’s safe to use. It’s cheap and fast to make and IT REALLY WORKS!!!

 

 

YOUR SHOPPING LIST:

1. Cocoa butter

2. Organic coconut oil

3. Arrowroot

4. Vitamin E

5. Essential Oil

– this blog post has affiliate links to Amazon.com. That means I get small commision for each purchase done through the links used in this post

Related articles

• Homemade Oatmeal Cocoa Butter Honey Milk Lotion (momphotographer.wordpress.com)
• Homemade Deodorant – Easy, Natural And Working (ipreferorganic.com)
• DIY Deodorant (blogher.com)
• Tree-Hugger Tuesday: Living green doesn’t mean smelling like a dirty hippie… does it? (womenarefrommars.wordpress.com)
• Paraben present in cosmetics and deodorants strongly linked to Breast Cancer! (environmentandhealth.wordpress.com)
• Top five ingredients to avoid in deodorant (naturalnews.com)
• What is propylene glycol (antiagingchoices.com)