Adventures in Chemistry

A few weeks ago I came across the Indistructables site and found something I have been looking for, well as long as I've been interested in Sustainability! It's a recipe for how to make your own deodorant. Deodorant is one of those necessary evils. It's full of dodgy chemicals, terrible for the environment and suspect to your own health, but noone wants to stink like the scary man that hangs out in the local charity shop, so we use it.
This recipe uses natural ingredients, easily found at my local Asian food store and promises to ban odour as well as keeping my pits dry. I hope noone feels I'm being too familiar when I say, since I was 11 I have been frankly plagued with pits that get very, very wet if I don't use Sure Stick...Sorry to name my shame and a Brand name but I've tried them all and when this one came out on the market I jumped for joy cause at last I could raise my arms in public! Smell, doesn't seem to be much of a problem for me, well noone has openly complained, and my kids are brutally honest with me and I'm sure they would have said something if there was a problem there. So, in essence this recipe has a lot to live up to. Can it keep me dry, smelling nice, be easy, non-time consuming to make and cheap enough for it to be worth while doing?

Today, I used the last of my regular deodorant and headed off to the shop in search of, corn starch, baking soda, coconut oil and some essential oils to make it smell pretty. I couldn't find corn starch, but did get potato starch instead, the packet said it can be used instead of corn starch in cooking so lets see if it works in deodorant! Also, I remembered I had some essential oils at home, so I didn't buy any at the store... More on that later...So, here is the mix after I added a bit of shea butter (left over from soap making) and wacked it in the microwave for a sec or two to soften the oils cause the were rock solid in my freezing kitchen. Now, back to those oils... after rooting about all I could find was ....Pine and Eucalyptus... Well at least the Pine is antibacterial, even if I will smell like toilet cleaner....
The consistancy was very good and when I rubbed my fingers together, it had the same drying effect of my usual deo... all good so far.
So here is the finished product packed professionally into my old cleaned out deo dispenser. I popped it in the fridge to set and will be trying it out for the first time tomorrow. For fairness sake I will try it for a week and then post my findings then! In the mean time, I think the packet is looking a little boring and is in need of a bit of decoration, so please comment and tell me what you think a good name for it should be. Del's deo?...Eco Pits! .... I'm sure you can do much better than me!