A life less idle

“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”    Edward Abbey

Well, I’m not full out homesteading (yet), but I’m becoming very disillusioned about many things the media and big businesses tell us we Must Have. For instance, I’ve been shampoo free since July – and, granted, I’m still playing around with it a little bit, but my hair doesn’t stink, I can still brush it, and my roommate (who doesn’t actually know of my little experiment) recently told me it looked good down. And I never wear my hair down, because historically it looked like crap down. But today I’m not going to write about that.

I’m almost out of deodorant. I can see the plastic at the bottom of the tube; it’s going to be gone within the next few days. This realization has prompted me to look up DIY solutions – gotta be something, right? Turns out nearly every DIY solution I’ve found involves baking soda – well, and then there’s crystals, but I’m throwing that out.

The first and easiest solution is to straight up rub some baking soda on your armpits. That’s it! Theoretically, it can work in sweaty environs for two days! However, as mentioned here, you can mix it with cornstarch. This site recommends adding essential oils, and maybe using a wet mix of witch hazel and glycerin if you don’t like the dry method.  On the essential oils note, I’ve seen a few comments saying they add tea tree oil, which wasn’t mentioned on that last site. I’ve seen it recommended elsewhere that you could put a little witch hazel on your armpit prior to the baking soda, but I don’t recall where I saw that. Angry Chicken has a baking soda based buttery recipe. The Post Punk Kitchen forum, a vegan site with some exceedingly tasty recipes, has a discussion on DIY deodorant stemming from the Angry Chicken post.

Also, some people use alcohol as deodorant! Rubbing alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, even vodka. It has to be sprayed on, so one would need to acquire a little spray bottle. It seems to be recommended to spruce it up a little with some sort of essential oil – peppermint and wintergreen are popular.