I’ve been a No-Chemicals advocate for almost as long as I can remember.

I don’t see the point of clogging up our bodies and the earth’s precious waterways with unnecessary chemicals.

Teens and products

I became much more vigilant about cosmetics and body products in 2010 when my daughter became a ‘tween’ and started to put pressure on me to buy her a cool deodorant ‘like the other girls’.

I’m happy to see parabens have been taken out of many products since then. However, we still have a long way to go. Young people’s hormonal systems are finely tuned, and there are a great deal more chemicals (primarily plastics and pesticides) in our daily lives than there were in our grandparents’ day. We don’t need to add more into the mix.

Swiss Quality?

Being in Switzerland, I thought there would for sure be some super, affordable, non-toxic, Swiss-approved, organic, bio deos and products for teens and tweens.

Not so much. As of 2017, the landscape is changing, but the mainstream, affordable-for-tweens deodorant choices in the supermarkets are infuriatingly poor and crammed with unnecessary chemicals. They’re mostly owned by big corporations with big advertising budgets, and they’re laced with aluminium or are spray-ons—an environmental disaster right there. The industry guidelines and ‘rules’ about what constitutes a deodorant and what constitutes an anti-perspirant are, frankly, archaic.

Charlotte & Waterson (Sherlock & Watson)

In 2011, I set up a blog for one of the fictional characters I was writing about (Lyla Waterson), because I was so frustrated at the ‘architects of choice’ who decide which chemicals our daughters should wear, and then market said products to them.

Lyla went on to become the protagonist Charlotte’s side-kick, and my vision was to reinvent the mainstream deodorant and hair care market with products by Lyla Waterson.

(I also set up a Tumblr but that didn’t exactly work out because gifs about Imidazolidinyl urea haven’t really taken off. Go figure.)

My cosmetics empire isn’t going to happen overnight—it took me two years to write the book, Charlotte Aimes—but, in the meantime, I built a website with information for young readers.

Lunch with Deo-Man

At the European Trends Day here in Zurich in 2012, I serendipitously sat next to a man responsible for new products at one of the big cosmetics companies.

Of course, I immediately asked him about deodorants—who makes decisions? how would I get a new deodorant on the market?—but he seemed disinterested.

I suggested he might like to, for example (!), partner with a YA author to put out a deodorant from a fictional character’s storyworld. However, the look on his face indicated that he may have thought I was nuts.

That’s okay. I’m learning more about manufacturing with my latest startup. And perhaps one day I’ll meet the right people, and be educated enough to manufacture an affordable, sustainable and attractive product for young teens and tweens that has zero impact on the planet, and zero impact on their bodies.