The Story of Ziryab's Body Brew
Ziryab’s Body Brew began by accident and with incredible skepticism.
When I made my first deodorant, I started with a common DIY recipe online (but of course veered off it immediately). My goal was simply to make something I could use in addition to the three antiperspirants I wore every day.
I never, ever thought it was even possible to make a deodorant that could eliminate odor and staining for 24 hours.
But that’s what I had made.
My first reaction wasn’t “Eureka! I’m going to sell this!” Not even close. My reaction was: someone must already be selling this.
But they weren’t. I had to figure out why not.
It took me two years to understand the answer to that mystery. In the end, I concluded that if the product was going to exist, I would have to sell it myself.
A Damp Inheritance
I suffer from excessive perspiration.
I don’t gently perspire and I certainly don’t merely “glow.”
My middle name is Leigh, I was named after my grandmother, Leona. I even shared the same birthday. Sharing a birthday with my grandmother was wonderful. Unfortunately, I also shared a genetic tendency to sweat, a lot!
My grandmother dealt with sweating by wearing absorbent armpit pads pinned into her dresses and blouses. I tried this once when I was Maid of Honor at my sister’s wedding. We had fallen in love with a lovely dusty rose silk bridesmaid dress and I thought this would protect the dress but I I managed to sweat around the pads, leaving perfect sweat stains outlining them. I spent most of the wedding in the bathroom blow drying my underarms.
Since then, I’ve become an expert on which fabrics, colors, and patterns hide perspiration.
The Battle Against Body Odor
While I eventually learned to live with the sweating itself, I can not tolerate body odor. I have what Kevin would describe as an acute sense of smell. It is impossible for me not to worry about how I smell.
My solution before my deodorant was layers and layers of commercial antiperspirant. After showering I would apply one, sometimes two, sometimes three layers. I carried antiperspirant in my purse and reapplied it during the day. If I forgot to bring one with me, I would immediately go searching for the nearest store to buy another.
The system sort of worked. I didn’t smell like body odor.
But after a few hours I smelled like old, stale deodorant, which I loathe almost as much as body odor itself.
I tried various strategies over the years: quick wash-ups in public bathrooms, wipes, and carrying spare tops. None of it really solved the problem.
So when I stumbled into making my own deodorant, I had no idea it might actually change things.
A Slow-Moving Realization
The morning after I tried my homemade deodorant, I woke up only half aware of something pleasant.
I was enjoying the smell of… something.
Then I realized it was my underarms.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I liked the way my underarms smelled. Coincidence? Maybe a pleasant side effect of the essential oils I had used?
After my shower I put a layer of antiperspirant and my deodrant. Throughout the day I kept checking and finding, to my amazement, that there was still no smell. A single layer of antiperspirant never worked this well. No body odor, no rancid deodorant smell, no irritation.
I thought it was a fluke.
Maybe my diet had changed. Maybe I was getting older and my body chemistry was shifting. Maybe I had simply gotten lucky.
So I went a day without anything. Nope. I still needed odor protection. So, next I tried my deodorant without antiperspirant. Drumroll.
It worked. It worked alone. It worked in San Diego, it worked in Yuma, it worked in Florida! I didn’t need to change tops halfway through the day. I could travel, ride crowded subways in Toronto, or sit on airplanes without constantly worrying about how I smelled. And incredible bonus, suddenly I could wear white shirts without immediately staining them yellow.
Best of all, I stopped thinking about it all the time.
Sharing It With Others
For a long time I only made the deodorant for myself.
Eventually my mother asked me to make some for her. She loved it. Then I made some for a friend who couldn’t wear commercial antiperspirants because they made his underarm glands swell painfully.
I tried to show people how to make it themselves, but most of them were reluctant. They preferred that I make it for them.
Even then it took me a long time to consider selling it.
It seemed obvious to me that companies like Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Johnson & Johnson must know something I didn’t. Surely there had to be a good reason they weren’t making deodorants like mine.
Eventually I realized the answer was simple. Large companies can only sell products that work for almost everyone, all the time.
My deodorant isn’t like that.
If you use too much of it—or if you don’t really need a strong deodorant in the first place—the alkalinity can irritate your skin. But for people like me, whose sweat is very acidic, that same alkalinity can be a lifesaver.
Once I understood that, the mystery disappeared. My deodorant wasn’t designed for everyone. It was designed for people like me.
And those people deserved the chance to try it.
If the big companies weren’t going to make it, then I would have to sell it myself.
Curiosity and Forgotten Remedies
But making the deodrant changed my perspective at some level.
If something as simple as my deodorant could work so well, what other practical solutions might exist that we had simply stopped using? Or had we made things so fancy that we lost the simple solutions?
I began searching for other home remedies and traditional practices. Sometimes they appeared in obscure corners of the internet. Sometimes customers told me about things their parents or grandparents used. And I got a couple others from memories of what my grandma used (Aloe, toothpowder, rainwater).
I knew about Sea Buckthorn Oil and its origins, but I became a convert when a customer told me about how, in Russia, her father made his own sea buckthorn oil to heal work-related injuries. Suspecting I knew the anser, I asked what he did for a living.
He was a nuclear physicist.
Another woman from Ghana told me that when she was a child her mother used African black soap to soothe her itchy skin. And there were more, so many more!
Grandmother’s around the world used fire ashes to clean their teeth.
Indian Neem was called the tree of gold for all the remarkable things it could do.
Magnesium might help hair grow by dissolve the calcium deposits that are plugging up hair folicles.
Whenever I heard stories like these, I went looking for research. Sometimes I found modern scientific studies that supported these traditional uses. Sometimes I found centuries of practice but very little modern research. I also noticed that the amount of research often depended on whether money could be made from it.
Burning Man and the DIY Spirit
Long before the business started, Kevin and I were going to Burning Man.
Eventually we started our own camp there called Camp DIY, where our camp taught classes celebrating all the things people can make for themselves.
One of the first workshops I ever taught there was how to make my deodorant.
I had a long list of everyday things people could make themselves: deodorant, toothpowder, simple remedies and household products.
Burning Man also introduced another idea that eventually became a product. People often spray themselves with apple cider vinegar in the desert because it helps soothe skin irritated by the alkaline dust.
The problem was that I hated smelling like vinegar.
I started dreaming about something that worked the same way but smelled better.
When I eventually learned how to make lotion, that idea became my ACV Lotion. For a couple of years it was the only lotion I made.
It turns out apple cider vinegar in lotion can help with much more than desert dust—it can soothe many kinds of irritated or itchy skin.
Soap: The Product People Understood
As I began selling at markets, I quickly discovered something practical.
Many of the products I was making were unfamiliar to people.
Toothpowder? My grandmother had used it, but most people had never seen it before. Deodorant in a jar? Rescue balms? People were curious, but often unsure what they were looking at.
Soap, however, everyone understood.
Once I began making soaps, something shifted. People would come to my table for the soap and then start asking questions about the other products.
Soap became the doorway that allowed everything else to make sense.
The Name
A discussion of the comapny can’t be done without talking about our name. I credit Kevin, he did the absolutely practical research of googling “Who invented deodorant”
“Ziryab.”
It took us about 30 seconds, and we both absolutely knew it was our name. We understood it was a difficult name, an odd name that not all people would think was as awesome as we did. And we didn’t care because it was the right name for us and for what we believed in.
We live on a small globe and we are committed to respecting the other people we share the earth with. My appreciation of other cultures has been with me all my life and was cemented in anthropology classes and a semester abroad in Kenya and in travelling when I can.
Ziryab was a musician and cultural innovator who lived in Spain during the early Islamic Golden Age. Among many other things he is credited with introducing bangs as a hairstyle, seasonal clothing, early forms of toothpaste, and innovations in music.
The second half of the name came from one of my earliest packaging ideas. I planned to sell my deodorant in recycled beer bottles—actual corked bottles that looked like little brews for the body. I wanted to do something sustainable and eco-friendly.
In theory it sounded great.
In practice, anyone who has ever boiled bottles, peeled labels, sterilized them, and filled them will understand that recycling bottles is a beautiful idea that quickly becomes a lot of work.
Eventually the bottle idea was retired.
But the name Ziryab’s Body Brew remained.