Right now, in the UK, there is a serious problem with women’s anti-perspirant deodorants. There has been what I can only describe as a backlash against using alcohol, with all brands now proudly emblazoned with ‘0% alcohol’ stickers, like it’s the greatest thing in the world.
I had been using Sure deodorants (the ones with alcohol in them) for years, since I was 12 and first started to wear deodorant. No deodorant ever came close to the performance level of Sure, and I was blissfully plodding through life with sweet-smelling underarms and no sweat patches. A couple of years ago, I was in Boots, and -Hello, what’s this?- next to the traditional Sure deodorants stood some weird milky looking ones with the ‘O% alcohol’ label. Gradually, the deodorants with alcohol were phased out until they were no longer available. I tried the no-alcohol ones, and here are the results of my comparison test:
Sure with alcohol ::::::::::::::::::::: Sure sans alcohol
Dries quickly Feels like you’ve put yoghurt in your armpits and won’t dry
Prevents sweating Puts up a feeble fight against the enemy that is sweat
Keeps you dry Feels unnervingly moist in the pit area all day
No smell after 12 hours Smells as if you’d gone au natural, i.e. unpleasant
Do they not perform tests on these products? With the new deodorants, I can barely do anything, let alone cycle or do any exercise. They don’t dry, get all over your clothes, and do pretty much nothing to stop you from sweating. If you go to their website, all they go on about is ‘your delicate underarms’, which seems damn presumptuous to me. How do you know that all women have delicate underarms? Mine are perfectly fine thank you! Years of shaving and alcohol deodorants have built up quite a tolerance! What about women that don’t simply flit about all day being delicate, what about normal women, who have to get on boiling hot buses, who have to exercise, who have to cope with the tendencies of certain fabrics to absorb sweat like a bloody Weetabix absorbs milk??
I’ve tried other deodorants, and while better than the milky sweat-fest that is the new Sure, they are still 0% alcohol and are still not up to scratch. I’m not freakishly sweaty, but it gets damn humid in England sometimes, and I’d like to be able to cycle and occasionally get flustered without having to constantly check for sweat patches. Women wear tighter clothes than men, yet men still get alcohol in their deodorants. Where’s the justice in that?
Thankfully I just found some old Sures on ebay, so I bought 5 of them. But then what? How much more money can I spend trying out crap deodorants?
The Old Sure: I miss you, friend
The New Sure: my mortal enemy
