AVSC Presents: Carbon Deodorant
Deodorant. The bane of most Artisan personal care businesses. Since we started in 2021 we have gone through periods of offering deodorant, admittedly in an apathetic way. While we did try our best each time, they never could live up to our standards as a product. Despite this, when it is available, it always immediately jumps to the second best selling product right behind our soap packs. The demand for natural deodorant is there, and we would bet it has never been higher.
After our last round of apathetic deodorant, we shelved it. Not to give up on it completely, but to save up some capital to develop something genuinely unique. Something we have actually never seen, at the time of writing this.
Enter Carbon Deodorant. We started from ground zero, abandoning all previous recipes and styles. We set some new rules right off the bat that must be met before getting back into the deodorant game.
Rule #1: Do not abandon purity. AVSC's core aspect is it's short, high quality ingredients lists for each product. This is a non-negotiable, nothing toxic and it needs to be pronounceable. That also means it cannot be an antiperspirant. No estrogen mimicking parabens, no aluminum build up, nothing that blocks and clogs sweat glands.
Rule #2: Glide like butter or better. You shouldn't have to break a sweat fighting your deodorant stick to apply it. This is a compromise most artisans make, previously ourselves included.
Rule #3: It has to work. Matching the standard "kinda sorta works" of other Artisans is unacceptable. It has to beat them in an AB test, and preferably gap them. Testing showed an effective range of 6-7 hours.
Carbon Deodorant is baking soda free, propylene glycol free, aluminum free, triclosan free, fragrance free, paraben free, phthalate free, talc free, and preservative free. Every possible box you can check from a safety standpoint, is. While there are plenty of charcoal deodorants available, most of them still compromise on purity in some way and in varying degrees. The most common is certainly artificial fragrance, which some can have thousands of unique aromatics. Another very common compromise is a suspect deodorizer, like propylene glycol, aluminum, and triclosan. Many of these have been found to increase hormone toxicity or have significant allergy risks. The same goes for preservatives, which the most common contain parabens. Parabens mimic estrogen and can disrupt hormone systems. These three common compromises also make up the majority of allergic reactions from commercial deodorant, or an eventual skin sensitization. Aluminum acts as a plug, starving bacteria of the sweat they need to fart, the source of armpit stink. Aluminum can stay in your pores for up to 2 weeks, this is why when you switch off any aluminum deodorant, you need to reserve judging any new one until your body clears the built up aluminum at least.
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Compared to our previous Tallow Deodorant, Carbon Deodorant follows a completely different philosophy, and requires a completely different (and much tougher) production process. First off, the biggest catch with Carbon Deodorant is it is unscented - in fact, it cannot be scented. The essential oils we use do not play nice with the matrix we developed, and also don't survive the required heat during production. We either had to wipe the board and start over, or commit to the recipe and not scent it. We obviously chose the latter, we deemed the recipe was too special to abandon. This compromise will definitely alienate a lot of folks, and that is unfortunate (and understandable).
The second catch is obviously the cost. While there are certainly more expensive deodorants out there, we recognize that Charcoal Deodorant is not exactly cheap - but there is an asterisk that we will get to later. The single biggest factor to this is the labor - it is about 12 times more labor intensive to make than our previous standard tallow deodorant. It requires several time consuming and unforgivably precise steps that cannot be rushed, and requires 100% observation throughout the entire processing block. Not to mention higher sustained temperature hazards, risk of batch failure throughout every step, and other new miscellaneous risks. This is a big reason as to why we are introducing CD as a pilot first before committing more resources into it, sales and reviews will tell us everything we need to know regarding it's viability. If folks don't buy it, we obviously can't make it. If folks don't like it, we can't keep making it. Now about that asterisk, the sneaky hidden value with CD is each stick lasts a very long time. Early estimations are around 12-18 months of everyday use, possibly even more. It is so use sparing that it was hard for us to even gauge it's usage rate during it's field test periods.
Whether it's for hunting, perfume clash, or sensitivity, we hope you enjoy AVSC's Carbon Deodorant. No other product in our history has undergone an equivalent R&D, field test period, or chemistry intensive process. Leave a review, send a message, let us know if we are over the target or not. Feedback and purchases will have the greatest effect on whether we pursue it as a permanent product. While we are extremely biased towards our shaving products, we have to admit that Carbon Deodorant is our crowning achievement from a chemistry and end product perspective. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
Thank you for your support as always and God bless.