Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Zinc oxide is an ingredient in medicated baby powders and ointments and lotions. It has known anti-bacterial properties. It occurred to me that it should be possible to use this in place of baby powders, which have as their bulk ingredient either talcum powder or corn starch. Corn starch is just yucky, it does absorb water, but then gets gooey and pasty. This zinc powder works great on your underarms - it keeps that area dry, and it disinfects the bacteria, which is what causes all of the odors. And so it also works great as an anti-perspirant and deodorant. It is a very fine powder that clings to your skin, especially wet or moist skin, and helps keep that part dry. Since the powder repels water, it has to be washed off with soap. Also, check out the company's elemental assay for this product. One aspect of zinc oxide is that it is difficult to separate out the lead oxide from other heavy metals which tend to lurk in the same veins. The company's assay for this zinc powder showed 0.001 percent lead. Pretty good, but still need to use this product cautiously. By way of comparison, the new lead limits for paint in children's products is 90 parts per million (ppm), and .001 percent is equivalent to 10 ppm. This particular product came in a zippered baggy. It's pretty easy to transfer it to your own containers. You can also get this zinc oxide in a plastic bottle in a 600 gram quantity, which is more than one pound (1 lb = 453.6 gm, 600 gm = 1.33 lbs.). The price of the bagged zinc oxide used to be much less than the plastic bottle, but the prices have since changed. Note: The obvious container to put this stuff in is an empty baby powder container. The lid with the rotating holes pops off easily with a screwdriver or the back end of a spoon. You need a wide mouth funnel to fill the container since the zinc oxide is pretty sticky and will clog up a narrow neck funnel. Because the zinc oxide is much stickier than talc or corn starch, you need to also make the holes in the baby powder lid larger, otherwise the zinc oxide will clog the small holes and not much will come out. So, first rotate the lid open so that the holes match up, and then drill through the holes to make them bigger. A 1/8 inch drill bit is about the right size. 2nd Note: Traveling through airports with this zinc oxide powder can be a hassle as the stuff gets TSA all riled up, especially if you put it into a container, such as a pill bottle, where they don't expect to see a powder. It will get pulled off to the side and chemical tested for explosives and drugs. 3rd Note: OK, I see the concern about this stuff being a nanoparticle (defined as under 100nm size) and possibly being mutagenic. So I emailed Essential Depot to ask them about this. Their reply was that their zinc oxide particle sizes range from 108nm to 132nm, with an average size of 120 nanometers. They should have an update on their Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) about this shortly. I would note that most of the studies describing the really bad (i.e. crossing cell membranes and binding to DNA) properties of nanoparticles are for particles well under 100nm, usually under 50nm. Not to defend this product against doubters, but the reason to make the particles so close to nanoparticle size is because larger particles show up as a white color in lotions. 4th note: Having moved to a warmer climate, I started using more and more of this stuff on myself, and needed to use a mask to keep from inhaling all the dust. I now use a NIOSHA respirator mask (the kind painters and others who work in high dust environments use) whenever I do a big time dusting.