Schmidt’s Natural Deodorants

Schmidt’s began in 2010 in Portland, Oregon, with Jaime Schmidt making natural personal-care products in her kitchen while pregnant. Deodorant became the product that took off. She sold her early formulations at farmers’ markets, and within a few years Schmidt’s had grown from a small maker business into one of the names that helped move natural deodorant out of health-food shops and into mainstream retail.

The proposition was refreshingly simple; make a deodorant from plant and mineral-derived ingredients that could compete with conventional deodorant on the thing that ultimately matters most, controlling body odour. Schmidt’s became particularly well known for combinations such as Rose & Vanilla, Lavender & Sage and Charcoal & Magnesium.

There is an important piece of the company’s history that shouldn’t be buried, though. Schmidt’s is no longer an independent natural brand. Unilever acquired the business in 2017. That puts it in the same corporate group as a huge portfolio of personal-care brands. I avoid big conglomerate-owned products like a disease but I like Schmidt’s deodorants too much and I support a female-owned business that became a success story.

The reason I have mixed feelings about acquisitions like this is because, on one hand, they can take products that were once difficult to find and put them within reach of millions more people. Natural deodorant becoming an ordinary supermarket choice is progress. On the other, I always want to know whether the formulations and principles that built the original following survive once a small founder-led company becomes part of a multinational corporation. In Schmidt’s case, that question is particularly relevant because long-standing customers have discussed formulation changes.

This brand is interesting because its current natural credentials aren’t based solely on the word “natural” printed across the packaging. Schmidt’s deodorants are made with ingredients of 100% natural origin and carry independent COSMOS Natural certification through Ecocert. That gives the term a defined standard behind it.

Schmidt’s is essentially a deodorant specialist, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a brand being very good at one ordinary product rather than trying to sell me an entire wellness lifestyle.

The core range consists of deodorant sticks and sprays in different fragrances. Familiar variants include Bergamot & Lime, Lavender & Sage, Rose & Vanilla and Charcoal & Magnesium. The formulations use ingredients such as coconut oil, shea butter, arrowroot powder, magnesium, candelilla wax, jojoba oil and essential oils or other natural-origin fragrance materials.

The standard sticks generally contain sodium bicarbonate, better known as baking soda. It helps with odour control but is also one of the ingredients that divides Schmidt’s customers quite dramatically because some people’s underarms tolerate it perfectly well and others don’t.

Schmidt’s has therefore also developed Sensitive Skin deodorants without baking soda. Coconut & Pineapple is one current example. It retains ingredients such as magnesium, coconut oil, arrowroot, shea butter, candelilla wax and jojoba oil but removes sodium bicarbonate.

The sprays work differently again and contain alcohol derived from non-GMO corn to produce their quick-drying consistency.

Natural deodorant has one fundamental problem, it can have the loveliest ingredient list in the world, but if I smell unpleasant by lunchtime, I’m unlikely to keep using it. I have tried many other deodorants from brands that are listed in my directory here and none of them worked. Schmidt’s built its reputation because a lot of people found that it actually worked.

That reputation can be found in independent discussions about natural deodorants repeatedly include people describing Schmidt’s as one of the more effective aluminium-free deodorants they’ve tried. Even in conversations containing complaints about irritation, it’s striking how often people preface the criticism by saying that it controlled odour extremely well. Others report using it successfully for years. Experiences clearly vary, but effectiveness is one of the recurring themes around the brand.

I also appreciate that Schmidt’s hasn’t simply removed aluminium and decided that this alone makes a deodorant “natural”. Its current sticks are independently certified to the COSMOS Natural standard through Ecocert and use ingredients of 100% natural origin.

That distinction is useful because “aluminium-free” and “natural” aren’t synonyms. A deodorant can contain no aluminium salts while still being made largely from conventional cosmetic ingredients. COSMOS Natural establishes criteria covering ingredients and processing as well as areas such as petrochemical ingredients, GMOs, manufacturing and packaging.

The formulations themselves are relatively easy to understand. In the Bergamot & Lime stick, for example, I find magnesium, coconut oil, arrowroot, shea butter, fractionated coconut oil, baking soda, candelilla wax, vitamin E, jojoba and citrus oils. Schmidt’s also publishes the full INCI information rather than reducing the label to a few photogenic botanical ingredients.

There are no aluminium salts, parabens, phthalates, propylene glycol or artificial fragrance in the current certified natural deodorants.

Its approach to fragrance is worth explaining properly. “Natural fragrance” can sound frustratingly vague, but Schmidt’s defines its fragrance as blends of essential oils and plant isolates of natural origin. The legally required fragrance constituents and allergens are then disclosed in the ingredient lists where applicable. Bergamot & Lime, for example, identifies citral, linalool and limonene.

Animal welfare is another uncomplicated positive. Schmidt’s is Leaping Bunny certified cruelty-free and Vegan Action certified vegan. These are third-party standards rather than logos invented by the company itself.

Perhaps the biggest achievement of Schmidt’s is less tangible. It helped demonstrate that natural personal care didn’t have to remain a tiny niche. A product made with coconut oil, shea butter, arrowroot and baking soda could sit alongside conventional deodorants and attract people who had never previously shopped for natural body care.

Schmidt’s has an Achilles heel, and it comes up far too frequently in independent customer discussions to ignore, underarm irritation. This has never happened to me in my years of using their products. But the original formulations use baking soda. For many people that’s completely uneventful. For others, Schmidt’s and other baking-soda-based deodorants can be extremely uncomfortable.

I found numerous independent accounts from people describing redness, itching, burning, bumps or substantial underarm rashes after using Schmidt’s. Some say the deodorant initially worked beautifully and irritation appeared later. Others describe reactions occurring relatively quickly.

Customer reports can’t establish that sodium bicarbonate caused every one of those reactions. Fragrance ingredients, essential oils and individual sensitivities are other possibilities. But baking soda is mentioned repeatedly by users, including people who say their problems disappeared when they switched from Schmidt’s standard formulation to its baking-soda-free Sensitive Skin range.

This isn’t a reason for me to condemn the standard deodorant. Skin is individual. It is, however, enough for me to take the pattern seriously.

The Sensitive Skin range is therefore much more than a marketing variation. For someone who has previously reacted to baking-soda deodorants, it changes the formulation in a meaningful way.

Natural fragrance deserves similar individual consideration. Schmidt’s fragrances come from natural-origin materials, but Bergamot & Lime contains naturally occurring fragrance components including citral, linalool and limonene. Charcoal & Magnesium lists a considerably longer group of fragrance constituents, including amyl cinnamal, benzyl salicylate, citronellol, geraniol, hydroxycitronellal, limonene and linalool.

Their presence doesn’t invalidate the COSMOS Natural certification. It simply illustrates something worth repeating: a substance can be genuinely natural and still interact with skin. Natural products aren’t biologically empty products.

The Unilever ownership also changes how I view the company.

I don’t automatically reject every good brand the moment a large corporation buys it. That would ignore the possibility that mainstream ownership can make better products available to vastly more people. But Schmidt’s isn’t the small Portland maker business it once was, and that should be transparent on a directory concerned with the companies behind the labels.

More importantly, there are independent customer discussions from people who believe products they used for years have changed. Some report differences in effectiveness, fragrance or irritation after newer formulations appeared. These are customer observations rather than proof that Unilever ownership caused a particular formulation decision, so I wouldn’t make that leap.

The current formulations themselves are what we should look at here. Interestingly, despite those concerns, Schmidt’s has subsequently achieved independent COSMOS Natural certification. So the story isn’t as simple as “big company bought natural brand and ruined it”.

I find the reality more useful, the company changed ownership, formulations have evolved, some established customers aren’t happy about those changes, yet the current products still meet a recognised independent natural-cosmetics standard. All of those things can be true at once.

One final point is the distinction between deodorant and antiperspirant. Schmidt’s doesn’t use aluminium salts and doesn’t work by blocking perspiration. Its job is primarily odour control. You can still sweat while wearing it. This is what I like the most about the products.

I don’t consider sweating itself a defect that needs eliminating. Perspiration is a normal physiological process involved in thermoregulation. If someone specifically wants to prevent underarm wetness, however, they shouldn’t buy Schmidt’s expecting it to behave exactly like an aluminium-salt antiperspirant.

This is one of the stronger areas of the brand. Schmidt’s current natural deodorants carry COSMOS Natural certification through Ecocert. The company says its certified deodorants contain ingredients of 100% natural origin.

COSMOS Natural is not the same as COSMOS Organic. Schmidt’s should therefore be described as a certified natural brand rather than a certified-organic deodorant brand.

COSMOS certification sets requirements covering natural-origin ingredients, processing, responsible use of natural resources, manufacturing and packaging and excludes categories including GMOs, parabens, phenoxyethanol, synthetic perfumes and synthetic colourants.

Schmidt’s is also Leaping Bunny certified cruelty-free.

Its products are Certified Vegan through Vegan Action.

Those three standards address different questions: whether the formulation meets a recognised natural-cosmetics standard, whether animal testing is permitted and whether animal-derived ingredients are used. Having independent verification across all three gives Schmidt’s a stronger foundation than a package simply covered in leaves and “clean beauty” terminology.

Schmidt’s gets an Approved Brand rating from me, although this isn’t one I’d buy without first deciding which formulation suits my skin.

There is quite a lot packed into the history of one stick of deodorant. Schmidt’s began with a pregnant woman experimenting in her Portland kitchen, became a farmers’ market success, helped push natural deodorant into mainstream personal care and was eventually bought by one of the world’s largest consumer-goods companies.

Normally that last chapter would make me look much more closely at what happened next. What I find is more nuanced than I expected. The independent ownership is gone and some long-term customers are unhappy about formulation changes. Those points belong in the story. Yet today’s Schmidt’s deodorants aren’t merely trading on the natural reputation established by the original company. The current range has gone through independent Ecocert assessment and achieved COSMOS Natural certification, with formulations made from ingredients of 100% natural origin.

The ingredients are also refreshingly recognisable for a mass-market deodorant: magnesium, coconut oil, shea butter, arrowroot, candelilla wax, jojoba, baking soda and natural-origin fragrance materials appear across the sticks. Aluminium salts, parabens, phthalates and artificial fragrance are absent from the current natural deodorants. Cruelty-free and vegan status are independently certified too.

I’d choose Schmidt’s by formulation rather than by fragrance alone. If I already knew that baking soda irritated my skin, I’d go straight to Sensitive Skin. If fragrance was my problem, I’d inspect the individual ingredient list rather than assuming that natural fragrance automatically meant non-irritating. I wouldn’t expect it to stop me sweating. That’s not what this product is designed to do. I want deodorant to deal with odour without necessarily interfering with the normal biological process of perspiration.

Schmidt’s may no longer be the little independent natural brand that began at a farmers’ market, but the product has achieved something significant. It helped make genuinely natural deodorant normal. Today I can buy a COSMOS-certified, vegan, cruelty-free deodorant made entirely from natural-origin ingredients through ordinary mainstream retailers. 15 years ago that was a much less ordinary proposition. For all my reservations about the change in ownership, that’s progress worth recognising.