Disclosure: This natural personal care products shop has been compensated by #CollectiveBias Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions about staying #FreshNaturally are mine alone.

Let me just state this for the record: I hate making my own natural personal care products to use on myself. I’ll make cleaners for the house, and laundry detergent, if need be. However, when it comes to making my own deodorant like I see everyone doing on Pinterest, I just cringe at the thought of creating my own armpit odor fighter. I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s why I normally choose to head to Whole Foods and pick up something they deem worthy to be placed on their shelves! It makes sense, right?

Natural personal care products

This may shock many of you, but I’m a woman. I know, it’s crazy. I should have told you all long ago in a more formal announcement, but I feel now’s the time to make it clear: I am woman, hear me roar. While I’m roaring, I’m also making it very clear, as a woman, I’m concerned about all the artificial garbage in my personal care products. Who needs preservatives in hair care items, nail polish, moisturizers, toothpaste, mouthwash, sunscreen, and wrinkle fighters? I don’t.

While I’m shopping around for my personal care items, I’m reading labels. While I’m reading labels, I’m seeing a whole lot of words I can’t pronounce in the ingredients of lots of personal care products. Trust me, I’d rather see natural ingredients, but the artificial ingredients seem to creep into everything from skin care, to deodorant. I don’t wear make-up, so if they want to keep using whatever they want to in those, I’m cool with it. (I’m kidding, I’m just checking to make sure you’re still with me.)

Seriously, I think preservatives, and artificial ingredients, have no place in anything we, as humans, put on our bodies, or ingest into our bodies. It’s just not necessary. It’s depressing to know I have to read my nail polish labels to make sure scary ingredients aren’t lurking around in my pretty colors. My poor daughter isn’t allowed to wear nail polish many of her friends wear, because I just won’t allow all the scary ingredients on her nails. One day she’ll thank me. Right now, she probably wants to throw the bottles at me. The life of a mother, right?

Normally, I’m not the one that does the grocery shopping, so I rarely head into grocery stores. If I’m in them, I’m usually just going to the personal care aisles to pick up things for myself. While I’m roaming the aisles of stores like Whole Foods, where they have high “natural ingredient” standards for the products they choose to sell, I’m finding alternatives to all the preservative packed personal products being sold at other grocery stores. I’m excited to have found them, because it means I don’t have to make any of the millions I see recipes for, on Pinterest!

It’s all well and good to find amazing products to wash my hair, condition my hair, wash my face, and lotion up the entire body. I like being clean, and well moisturized. I also like to smell nice, which leads me to the underarm.

Underarm protection

Under the old arms. The pits of perspiration. I’m a sweater. No, not the clothing! I can tell you I’m a big sweater while wearing sweaters! It doesn’t take much to make it happen. I could walk up my stairs and break into a sweat. I’m okay with sweating, it’s normal. Plenty of people have sweaty pits, and shirts with sweat coming through the armpit area. We all just ignore it, don’t we? We never bring it up to the person who has the sweaty pits. We look at everything else in the room, before we look at the armpit sweat coming through the shirt. Right? You know I’m right!

It is what it is. What I’m not okay with in this armpit sweating world? Smelling like my son’s sneakers after he’s been outside playing all day in the hot, gross sun. I’m sure no one around me likes it either.

Tom’s long-lasting deodorant is a more natural approach to keeping the sweat in check, while making sure I don’t stink up the entire neighborhood! There’s no aluminum in Tom’s of Maine, and artificial fragrance or preservatives. It also doesn’t have any animal ingredients, nor is it tested on animals. No little bunnies having their pits plastered with Tom’s of Maine to see if it’s any good. It gives me the warm and fuzzies knowing no animals are being harmed.

In a perfect world my sweat would smell amazing…. like freshly cleaned laundry. This isn’t a perfect world, though. Sweat is a huge part of life, but preservatives don’t need to be a part of fighting the smell of sweat. Sure, making my own from a recipe from Pinterest would be ideal. However, I’m good with relying on Tom’s of Maine to help my pits out. I’m pretty sure the rest of the world will thank Tom’s of Maine as well!