Baking Soda – Grandma's All-Rounder

At Grandma's, it stood somewhere between the flour, sugar, and all those jars where no one really knew what was inside: baking soda.
An inconspicuous white powder that surprisingly often came in handy. The drain smells funny? The oven needs cleaning? You want the dough to rise nicely when baking? Baking soda is often the solution.

Grandma might not always have known the exact details of why it worked. But she knew that it worked!

And indeed, there is more behind the simple white powder than one might initially assume. Baking soda is not only a proven household helper but also an exciting raw material for personal care due to its properties.
So, it's time to take a closer look at Grandma's all-rounder.

What exactly is baking soda?

Baking soda is a simple raw material. Baking soda – more precisely sodium bicarbonate – is a white salt. In nature, it occurs, among other things, in the mineral nahcolite. Sometimes baking soda is also synthesized and used from natural origins. At puralpina, we rely exclusively on natural baking soda.

Its most important property: baking soda is alkaline and can neutralize acids. Exactly this simple chemical property makes the inconspicuous powder so versatile.

One powder, countless possibilities

As we have already heard, baking soda is not only used in one place in the household. In the kitchen, the bathroom or when cleaning – baking soda helps to neutralize unpleasant odours, loosen dirt or remove grease and residues.
It is precisely the neutralization of odours that is of particular interest to us at puralpina.

Sweat stinks? Not quite.

A hot summer day, a hike, sports, or simply a somewhat stressful morning. We sweat, and that's a good thing. Sweating is a natural function of our body and helps, among other things, to regulate our body temperature.

What many don't know: Fresh sweat doesn't smell at first.

The typical sweat odor only develops when bacteria on our skin break down components of the sweat. And that's exactly where grandma's white powder comes into play again.

What does baking soda do in deodorant?

Baking soda is alkaline and thus influences the pH value on the skin. This in turn makes life more difficult for odor-forming bacteria. At the same time, baking soda helps to neutralize unpleasant odors and absorb moisture.

Instead of suppressing natural perspiration, baking soda therefore acts where the unpleasant odor originates.

That's precisely why we also use baking soda in our puralpina deodorant creams and deodorant sticks.
However, baking soda does not work alone. Together with zinc oxide, healing clay, and cornstarch, it helps to prevent unpleasant body odor and bind moisture.

So your body can continue to do what it's supposed to do: sweat. We can, however, gladly do without the unpleasant odor.

From the kitchen cabinet into our deodorants

Baking soda fits very well with our way of developing products. We like raw materials that don't need much fuss. Raw materials whose properties we can use specifically and that can be sensibly combined with other natural ingredients.

The combination of various natural ingredients is our basic recipe for manufacturing our products.

In addition to baking soda, our deodorants therefore contain, among other things, organic Swiss sunflower oil, Bernese Oberland beeswax, corn starch, zinc oxide, healing clay, and calendula from our own cultivation.

These are used to create our deodorant creams and deodorant sticks in our manufactory in Frutigen.

No complicated magic, but a well-thought-out mixture of various raw materials, where each one plays its part.

And baking soda? Among other things, it takes care of what it was particularly good at in grandmother's household: unpleasant odors.

Sometimes Grandma really is right

Now we know a lot more about why baking soda works so versatilely. We're talking about sodium bicarbonate, pH values, and odor-forming bacteria.

Grandma simply says: "Of course it works!"

Sometimes, you don't need to make things more complicated than they are. The small white powder has earned its permanent place in households over generations. With us, it has now found another place in our natural deodorants.

Grandma's all-rounder can do more than just baking and cleaning.