I don’t wear deodorant anymore and neither should you

Don’t sweat it


About six years ago, I arrived at my high school confident about the day ahead only to realize I forgot to put on deodorant. Embarrassed and fearing the worst, I ran down to the locker room and layered my armpits with the whitish flaky stuff.

Now, six years later, I get to celebrate a year without wearing deodorant. Some may say it’s disgusting, but quite frankly, I have my reasons for not wearing deodorant and I don’t care.

It started out as an experimentation to see what would happen after a few days without the stuff, but now I’ve realized there are reasons you shouldn’t  wear it.

Deodorant lines

First of all, I don’t have to worry about deodorant lines anymore. It doesn’t matter what color I wear or how thin the material is, my clothes stay clean and unstained by deodorant. Call it pure laziness, but I don’t have time for changing clothes because my first outfit gets ruined by my deodorant.

The scent

For some reason I can’t stand the smell of deodorant especially when it gets on clothing. To be honest, I’d prefer to smell sweat on anybody over too much deodorant.

The adaptation

So we use deodorant to control sweat, but actually our bodies can become immune to deodorant. What’s the point of wearing something that might not work well at all and actually make us sweat more?

The ingredients

This is the biggest reason I don’t wear deodorant anymore and you shouldn’t either. Since youth, we are taught that deodorant is to null out the smell of our sweat. However, the companies that produce deodorant don’t share the harms deodorant can cause to our bodies. Just to name a few, deodorant can contain aluminum compounds, silica, triclosan, and most commonly in deodorant, parabens; all of these are capable of causing breast cancer, something I have a risk with as being somebody with the breast cancer gene on both sides of my family tree. Deodorant, unlike regulated cosmetics, also  has talc which is another carcinogen. Propylene glycol is also in deodorant, which causes kidney and liver damage. And even at the most basic form, deodorant contains fragrance, which causes multiple harms to our bodies including putting toxins in our organs and causing allergies.

So what happens when I’m somewhere hot? Don’t I sweat? Well, yes, I’m human, but you would be surprised to know that sweating is actually another reason I don’t wear deodorant. After quitting using deodorant and suffering a few days of smelling and producing my typical amount of sweat, I now rarely sweat at all because deodorant itself isn’t catalyzing how much I perspire and my body doesn’t produce as much sweat – at least in my armpits.

When I played hockey for Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Although I wasn’t completely in my no-deodorant phase, I had gone a few days without deodorant during our hockey season. Although my forehead was sweaty as well as my stomach, my armpits weren’t sweaty at all. The only real issue armpit wise was that their was still a smell by my armpits; however, that could have been just the hockey equipment in general.

Even when I ran a 5k, I barely sweat until it became extremely muggy out.

What do my friends think? I asked two of my closest and most truthful friends and they said:

“I don’t think much of it. It’s not like you are a sweaty or smelly person.”

“You do you. If you can keep yourself clean and stuff, what’s the difference?

How many people don’t wear deodorant? Kourtney Kardashian didn’t wear it for awhile and still might not. I’m not saying she’s the best trend setter for hygiene, but it’s worth giving it a try. For me, it’s been a year without deodorant and I’m not going to use it any time soon.