Deodorants: 10 of the best

Many years ago, while overseeing the beauty desk at a glossy mag, I wrote a piece around our shifting relationship with sweat. There was no longer shame and embarrassment around it. We all sweat, what’s the big deal? At least that was the narrative around some fancy new deodorant launch being touted at the time. In reality, nothing much had changed. My editor looked positively queasy every time the word sweat was mentioned. It also didn’t help that deodorants had an image problem. They had always been about function, nothing more. We certainly didn’t expect them to look nice, hence their uninspired packaging (most likely developed around a table in equally humourless corporate offices where coming up with ambiguous scents like “fresh” and taglines like “Keeps you dry all day!” was considered genius). But now this unglamorous everyday essential has been given a glow up. Deodorants now come in slick, fun, beautifully considered packaging and scents that smell perfume-level good. (For the avoidance of confusion: deodorants tackle odour by neutralising bacteria; antiperspirants stop sweat by blocking pores, usually with aluminium salts.) Increasingly, consumers are eschewing antiperspirants for this new generation of deodorants, which tend to include skin-loving ingredients without compromising on efficacy. So while sweat itself hasn’t quite had a rebrand, thankfully, its nemesis has.