Cedarwood Vetiver Lime BALMUNDER™

Sweat doesn't smell.

It is mostly water, a little bit of salt and some tiny amounts of other body waste stuff. The millions of eccrine glands located all over our body sweat to maintain our internal body temperature.

When it comes to 'the pits-n-bits' there are different sweat glands present; these are called apocrine glands. These glands secrete a milkier sweat that has a different composition; namely fats and proteins. Apocrine glands are located in the 'grassy' parts of the body and secrete directly onto the hair follicles.

Bacteria live on your skin. We have trillions of them in and on our bodies. Bacteria that live in the 'grassy' parts like to munch on the rich apocrine gland sweat. The ‘leftovers' from bacteria’s feast is what we associate as body odor. Body odor is seen as bad which is kinda sad because it’s normal to smell. In fact, the apocrine glands main purpose is to give you your own distinctive stank.

Deodorants simply reduce the number of bacteria. This reduction in the number of bacteria eating your apocrine sweat allows you to not smell as much.

Conversely, antiperspirants only effect your eccrine glands from pumping out sweat, which doesn’t really do much except keep you drier. Since your armpits apocrine gland sweat is what feeds the bacteria and antiperspirants do nothing to suppress the output from these feeder glands; we think it’s best just to sweat!

The aluminum in antiperspirants is entirely different from the aluminum in the BALMUNDER tubes.

We’ve had some concern from customers that aluminum is bad in deodorant and they "can’t believe we use aluminum tubes for it!" We understand their concern but the aluminum they are referring to is completely different than the aluminum that makes up our cosmetic tubes (to read more about our aluminum tubes, go to 'Packaging' on our details page).

Aluminum chlorohydrate is the aluminum salt found in anti-perspirants. This is made when aluminum reacts with hydrochloric acid. This salt was designed to soak into your arm pit pores and prevent sweating. The 'FDA says' it’s safe at concentrations up to 25% in antiperspirants and requires antiperspirant manufacturers to list it on their label as aluminum salts, aluminum compounds, aluminum chlorohydrate, etc… always read labels!

Although there are negligible findings that long term exposure of aluminum leads to Alzheimer’s, cancers, kidney things and bone diseases, we don’t want to put it on our arm pits, so we won’t put it on yours either.