Is Your Deodorant Toxic?
Last Updated: 8 Jan 2025

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list common toxins, aluminium gets absorbed, alum is aluminium too, rub armpits..

Let's start with the basics. What most people call their "deodorant" is really two different things, it is indeed a deodorant but it is usually also an antiperspirant. These are two means of achieving the same goal, to make you smell better, or at worst less bad. Let's have a look at how they typically work.

The purpose of a "Deodorant" is to minimize or improve the smell itself.

The purpose of an "Antiperspirant" is to prevent sweating.

Preventing sweating is a tremendously dumb idea.

The body has many detoxification paths out of the body: the air we exhale, the tears we cry, leaving through our digestive tract, but the preferred way of the body is to detoxify a large majority of toxins through our skin whenever possible. Even our most ill-informed reader is surely well aware of the benefits of sweating. The intelligent reader will realize not just the long-term damage potential of actively blocking sweating, but also that said detoxification is the reason for the sweat to smell bad in the first place!

The worse someone's sweat smells, the more dangerous it would be for them to try to keep it inside their body.

Yet it is not acceptable for them to force their body odor on anyone else. Hygiene is appreciated for good reason. If someone smells bad, it is generally because the smell is toxic! Most toxins are of course not going to vaporize at body temperature, but water will evaporate and little droplets of water can carry toxins into air - we want fresh air, and we deserve it.

People have a duty to sweat, privately. Long warm showers and baths, sauna, exercise. Using antiperspirants is a really dumb way of trying to fix a lack of sweating.

When you learn how antiperspirants work, you may rightly be shocked.

Below, you can see a series of images which depict the horror. Warning to sensitive readers - the red dots are aluminium, yes, you read that correctly: the active ingredient is literally heavy metals applied to your skin.

You see, the aluminium particles are too large to pass through the sweat ducts, if they could, then people would be dropping dead with their deodorants in hand, and even the slow-witted health policy experts would have figured it out. Instead we have a situation where a lot of aluminium does get absorbed over time, but it's a matter of years and decades, so it flies below the radar. Just another toxic little habit that builds up over time and gets it's effects lumped in with supposed "natural aging".

Consider that a lot of people shave their armpits and then apply antiperspirant on all that damaged skin. Even if in some hypothetical scenario where the skin is 100% flawless, all it takes is to slighly scratch your armpit with a fingernail for aluminium to be pushed into your bloodstream. It is completely insane to apply heavy metals to your skin like this.

Some, not many, surprisingly few, but still some, people are rightly upset about the aluminium, so they seek more natural alternatives. If you go into the local eco hippie store and ask for this, they will most probably recommend "natural crystal deodorant" which is.. yes, also aluminium.

If you look at a pharmacy or a store with wide range of deodorants, you will find antiperspirants that proudly proclaim themselves to be ALUMINIUM-FREE! That sounds good, right?

Well, um, if you look at the ingredient labels, to see what they are doing, you will be confused, what are we looking at here, something we bought at the gas station for a tractor engine?

Perhaps the two instances of "Polymer" caught your attention? Yes, they are literally using microplastics as an active ingredient to plug your sweat glands shut. This is what happens when someone hears about aluminium in deodorant, and then proceed to trust the same companies that gladly sold them aluminium for years before.