If you've gone looking for a deodorant without baking soda, you had a reason. Baking soda is the quiet default in natural deodorant — the primary odor-fighter in most sticks, rarely explained — and for a meaningful number of people it's the exact reason their skin reacts. Fine for some. The whole problem for others.

Why baking soda is used

Baking soda — sodium bicarbonate — fights odor through alkalinity. Odor-causing bacteria prefer a specific pH range; raise the pH and you make the environment less hospitable to them. It's cheap, effective in mild conditions, and easy to formulate with. That's why it's everywhere.

Why it's a problem for sensitive skin

The same alkalinity that fights bacteria also disrupts your skin. Healthy skin maintains a mildly acidic surface — the "acid mantle" — that's part of its protective barrier. Baking soda sits well above that on the pH scale. Apply it repeatedly to a warm, damp, high-friction area like the underarm, and it can compromise that barrier: burning, redness, and a rash that some people mistake for a detox reaction. It isn't a detox. It's the ingredient.

Replacing baking soda the right way

Here's the part that matters: going baking-soda-free is only an upgrade if what replaces it actually controls odor. Plenty of "sensitive" formulas just remove baking soda and substitute fragrance, which masks odor temporarily and then fades. You've traded irritation for a product that quits by mid-day.

The better answer is to replace the mechanism, not just the ingredient. BioShield™ is baking-soda-free and works through a zinc-based system that eliminates odor at the source — targeting the bacterial process that creates smell rather than shifting the skin's pH to fight it. You get odor control without putting an alkaline ingredient on acidic skin.

That's the design behind SENSITIVE: baking-soda-free, fragrance-free, and clinically tested at 0% irritation across a clinical panel. If baking soda has been the thing wrecking your skin, removing it — and replacing it with something that works — is the whole fix.

→ SENSITIVE is baking-soda-free by design. If you also sweat heavily, MAX is baking-soda-free too.