How a hot tub got me to quit deodorant.

New Year's Eve 2019. I packed one too many friends into a backyard hot tub in Lake Tahoe.

Two days later I had folliculitis under both arms — the bacterial infection that thrives in over-used hot water.

My doctor was direct. Wash the area in the shower with a hospital-grade cleanser. Skip deodorant for a week. Come back if it's not gone.

I bought the red bottle they sell at drug stores. The bumps cleared in days.

End of the week, I reached for the deodorant — and realized I'd gone nine days without it. Hadn't even noticed.

There was no smell.

Not less. Not manageable in the morning. None. Days I skipped the shower. Days after long rides. Days that would have meant a re-up at lunch.

I was still sweating, which is what the body's supposed to do. The morning stick was the part I never missed — aluminum, fragrance, fingers crossed.

I asked my doctor if I could keep doing this. He said sure, and to stop if anything got irritated. Nothing did.

I told my wife. She tried it. Same result. She hasn't bought a stick since.

Same routine ever since. In the shower, once. The cleanser travels with me. I haven't owned a stick of deodorant in six years.

Tokyo in August humidity. Packed Berlin trains in winter coats. Paris in warm weather. SF gyms on weekday afternoons. The kind of days that used to mean a midday re-up. Nobody who'd tell me — wife, friends, the guy on the next bench — has said a word.

Once you stop using a stick you start seeing them everywhere. White chalk on a black shirt. Fragrance built to cover. None of it needed to be there.

A few years in, once I was sure it wasn't a fluke, I got curious about what was actually in that red bottle — and whether it was the best version out there.

It wasn't.

In the late 1980s a German firm developed a different, longer-lasting, less irritating ingredient. Octenidine. Three decades on EU pharmacy shelves. It never really made it to the US.

A hospital cleanser was never going to be the answer — wrong packaging, wrong shelf. But the routine itself — the underarm step that ends in the shower instead of starting after it — was the part I wanted to keep.

I left tech in 2025. Six years on the same routine and it kept feeling strange that nobody had put a version of it on a bathroom shelf. Not a hospital prep — just a daily thing for skin.

Once I started looking, the gap was obvious. There's an entire aisle for what you do after the shower. There's no aisle for what you do in the shower. None. So I made one.

It's a foaming cleanser with Octenidine, plus glycerin and allantoin so skin doesn't feel stripped after. You use it on the underarms. You rinse. You're done.

I called it GoodSweat because the sweating is fine. It's the cover-up I never wanted to keep doing.