i am about out of deodorant and so it occurred to me that it’s time to share with you all what cousin and i call “the program.”

so arm and hammer make two different kinds of deos. one is Ultra Maxx and one is Essentials. ultra maxx is the anti-perspirant aka contains aluminum and essentials is natural deodorant.

your momness, why are you sharing this information?

be patient, my pet, time for getting personal.

so i’ve tried and tried to go all natural with deodorants and even au natural without but let’s face it, sometimes life calls for a deodorant with anti-perspirant. once darla was born i had to suck it up for the 13 months that i was breastfeeding and ban the aluminum from my body but oh my lawd….my body did this weird thing where my left underarm was on overload and it just reeked. sometimes it would rub off on darla’s head while i was nursing and i’d pick her up afterwards and get a whiff and i’d know that i wasn’t a pleasant lady to be around on hot summer days.

but, something else happened while i was going non-aluminum. i stopped caring. as much. not completely because i’m not that bad ass but i decided that if i smelled like A NORMAL HUMAN BEING with NATURAL BODY ODOR it doesn’t really matter. i mean, i shower frequently enough that i’m not going to clear out a restaurant or anything so why did i need to subject my body to the harmful effects when the truth is it isn’t so bad. and no one else seemed to notice it as much as i did.

since then i’ve experimented with different natural deodorants and arm and hammer is by far the best i’ve come across. plus, they are one of the cheaper choices in the deodorant aisle. BONUS!! (btw, isn’t it ridiculous our country has a whole aisle just for deodorant???) most of their scents seem to be a little less offensive. i’d rather just smell like baby powder mixed with b.o. not some synthetic freesia masking the b.o. that still permeates through anyway…so i pick up the natural kind and the maxx and use the maxx on the days that i know i need to be more ummm presentable but mostly just stick to using the naturals.

smelling just a little is definitely better than breast cancer.

and if you’re a nursing mother, please! don’t use deodorant containing aluminum while you’re nursing your little one. you just can’t do it. don’t even get me started on the clinical strength stuff that deters your body from sweating at all…

cousin and i discovered that we had come to use the exact same deodorant schedule without communicating with each other. henceforth we called it “the program.” ok, well, we called it the program once and then i just kept calling it that in my head and she’s just now finding out about that, if she’s reading and SHE BETTER BE!!!, but that is all irrelevant.

hopefully you and your cousins will find this deodorant system to be a compromise that works, too.