Since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Cleo+Coco wants to continue to shine a light on toxic ingredients found in conventional personal care products. The first step in eliminating toxic ingredients from your personal care routine is taking a closer look at your deodorant and eliminating aluminum. Why does aluminum need to be eliminated? Aside from potential links to Alzheimer’s and breast cancer, it blocks a very healthy and natural bodily process – sweat!

Our bodies are meant to sweat. The sweat that comes from our armpits are a healthy way for our bodies to release toxins. But we don’t want to smell. And we don’t want excess sweat making us feel sticky and staining our clothing.

But when we block our sweat with aluminum (found in conventional antiperspirants) we get a build up of smelly bacteria that never gets released, stuck in our armpits near important glands and lymph nodes and breast tissue. We certainly don’t want that. Which is one of the main reasons why we created our Charcoal Deodorant Formula.  With our formula, instead of using aluminum to block sweat glands, we use activated charcoal, magnesium and arrowroot powder to combat odor, allowing you to release those toxins – the way your body is meant to. With the charcoal in our formula there to capture and eliminate the bacteria as your body releases it, eliminating odor as well. We added plant powders like arrowroot and clays for wetness absorption and minerals like magnesium for extra odor protection, creating a formula that gives a boost to your health, instead of compromise.

A second reason to stop using conventional deodorants is because of synthetic fragrance.  Synthetic fragrance is a catch us term that can hide any potentially toxic, ugly ingredient that would not make a product truly ‘natural’ or ‘clean’. And synthetic fragrance in products that create the scent, have been linked to hormone disruption. We at Cleo+Coco believe that its really important for consumers to be aware of this and be able to make the choice of whether they want to mess with their hormones or not.

That’s why we use only pure therapeutic essential oils in our formulas, which have mood-boosting benefits like Energize, Calm and Clarity, have anti-bacterial benefits and smell absolutely amazing. This is another key difference between Cleo+Coco and most other popular aluminum-free deodorants on the market today.

In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness this month and every day, do good for yourself and those you love. Eliminate not only aluminum but synthetic fragrance, and still smell great!