Review: Dove Dry Spray Antiperspirant

Disclosure: I received these products for free from BzzAgent. Anyone can sign up and get free products to test and review. You do not need a blog. My review, as always, remains brutally honest.

Dove Dry Spray Antiperspirants in "nourished beauty" and "cool essentials"

Spray deodorant* reminds me of middle and high school gym class growing up in Canada. We weren't given enough time to shower after gym class, just barely enough time to change back into our regular clothes. This led to the use of a lot of spray deodorant, because (I think) it was considered less "gross" to spray stuff on your stinky pits than to rub a solid stick over and over again in your sweat. There was a definite deodorant hierarchy: spray > stick > roll-on. Roll-on people were hopeless nerds.

High school is ridiculous.

(*I do know the difference between antiperspirant and deodorant. One prevents perspiration and the other just improves smells. This particular product serves both purposes, so I'm just going to go with "deodorant," because it feels less awkward to me. Who really calls it antiperspirant?)

I've recently learned that in the U.S., spray deodorants all but disappeared from the market by at least the 80s with concerns about the environmental impacts of CFCs in aerosol cans. For whatever reason, Canadians and Europeans blissfully kept on using them all along. But aerosol's today aren't so bad. I mean, they're not perfect, but I think they have a lingering bad reputation that they don't necessarily deserve. Almost all the products we use are terrible and wasteful, so we have to figure out what our own thresholds are for that kind of stuff.

BzzAgent mailed me a can of the "nourished beauty" scent (with the blue cap). Very descriptive name! I assumed that this was the original Dove fragrance that most of their products have, but it's not really. They also sent me a coupon for another free can of my choice, from any of the brands that have released these dry sprays: Dove, Degree, or Axe. I offered to let my boyfriend try one, but he is apparently not a deodorant experimenter. I decided to buy a can of the Degree version for myself, so that I could compare it to the Dove that I already had. The Degree version has 23.3% of the active ingredient, aluminum chlorohydrate, while the Dove version has 20.2%. Not a huge difference, but could make for an interesting comparison, right?

At Kroger, where I bought this stuff, the only Degree fragrances they had on the shelf were "sheer powder" (bleh!) and "fresh energy" (meh?). But they had the Dove in "cool essentials," which is the cucumber fragrance, and I couldn't resist. I abandoned potentially interesting blogging for selfish reasons. I just really like that cucumber scent. (Both the Degree and Dove versions come in additional scents, but these were the only ones I found when I went shopping.)

This deodorant claims to apply instantly dry and to work for 48 hours. Initially, I assumed that "dry spray" just mean that it keeps you dry. You know, it's a spray to create dryness. But no, it does in fact go on dry. I don't know how. Some kind of sorcery, no doubt. It's quite nice, because it doesn't feel icy on your armpits when you apply it first thing in the morning in the middle of the winter and you're cheap frugal and only heat your apartment to 60 degrees at night. And you don't have to flap your arms around like fucking chicken wings waiting for it to dry like you do with gel formulas.

The downside in comparison to a solid, for me, is that I have to put this stuff on before I get dressed so that I don't spray it on my clothes, With a stick, I prefer to put in on under my shirt, both to limit nudity in my frigid bedroom, and to avoid smearing it on a shirt when I get dressed. That extra 20 seconds of partial nakedness is not something I am super excited to incorporate into my routine. On the plus side, I haven't noticed any of it transferring to my clothing when I get dressed. It does seem to be invisible.

The fragrance of the two varieties I have is very, very strong. My entire home smells like "nourished beauty" or "cool essentials" for a good 30-60 minutes after I use it. And it's not like I have terrible aim. But hey, maybe that's a benefit? Two-for-one: deodorant + air freshener. To me, the "nourished beauty" fragrance doesn't smell much like the traditional Dove fragrance that I expected. It really is more like some kind of Glade air freshener that is vaguely pleasant but not memorable enough to really describe. (Is that a cop out? I never can describe scents.) The "cool essentials" fragrance is more like what I expected it to be, and if you've ever bought any other Dove products with cucumbers on the package, you'll recognize it.

As for the 48 hour claim, it comes pretty close. In the name of blogging science, I tried to hold out on showering as long as possible to see how swampy my pits would get while using this stuff. I will say that I am not an excessively sweaty person. If I accidentally forget to wear deodorant one day, it's not great, but it's not a catastrophe. So that's my baseline. I got to about 30 hours without showering, and then I couldn't stand it anymore, mostly because my hair had long since overcome the efforts of my dry shampoo. At the point, my armpits were just very slightly sweaty and not at all smelly. As far as I could tell. I didn't force anyone else to confirm - in fact, I didn't leave the house during the test period. So maybe not 48 hours guaranteed, but longer than a typical antiperspirant. You might have even better results with the stronger Degree sprays. Really, though, my no showering experiment shouldn't have been necessary, because since antiperspirants work by plugging sweat glands (creepy), they technically should continue working to some extent even after showering.

I will probably go back to my favorite Mitchum solid when I use up these cans. (One thing I can't say yet is how long a can will last before it's empty. I usually get several months out of a stick.) But I can think of some reasons people might like this spray. If you tend to get deodorant transferring on to your clothes when you use a solid, that doesn't seem to be a problem with this. And I think it's preferable to other "invisible" formulas, like gels, because you don't have to wait for it to dry, and it's not sticky. It also does continue working for quite a long time - longer, if I remember correctly, than the "clinical" stuff that I last tried out a few years ago. If you like very intense fragrances in your deodorant, this will deliver - though if not, you should definitely avoid it.

I'm not necessarily an end-every-post-with-a-question blogger, but I am curious: anyone else planning to try these sprays out?