Clean Video Diaries: Hermione

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This has been a funny one. Fraught with danger I think would be a good way to describe it. My challenge was to make a mineral deodorant. So potassium alum is a commonly used mineral for deodorants, been used for hundred of years, a long history of it, and one way to get at potassium alum is to find a mineral called alunite and then heat it and purify the mineral from that rock.

So the first day it was out and about, having been set the challenge to go and find this mineral. And alunite is an interesting one, it’s not one that you can definitively say occurs in this location or this type of environment or this type of setting, it’s quite variable so I did need to get a little bit of help on where we might find it. And it was up in this incredible area around Red Mountain, which is very near where we’re based in Silverton and it was just stunningly beautiful. The rocks there are all red and oranges because there’s a lot of iron disseminated throughout the rocks by hydrothermal activity and that’s all weathering out to the most beautiful colours.

So we did some beautiful work up there just looking around, but unfortunately I took a bit of a tumble and fell down a scree slope which isn’t a great start to a challenge. But after that it was fine and actually we located the alunite and did a field test which meant that we had the mineral at the end of day one, which was great.

Day two and three I’ve really just been working at heating, crushing the rocks. So day two started off with a lot of crushing. I’m used to working back in a lab where you just shove it in jewel crusher and it comes out nice fine powder, so actually the Rough Science environment, crushing up your rocks, it’s quite a large part of what you have to do, but I’m getting used to it. So a lot of crushing and then trying to get a really, really hot coal fire to roast and smelt the alunite chippings.

And that was good up to a point, I sort of had three vessels; two Pyrex dishes and a little enclosed old coffee pot, got the fire so hot that when it started to rain the Pyrex just exploded and shattered, so that was the danger of day two. But the coffee pot proved to work very well. On opening that I found that it had been really smelted and roasted. The next stage is then to boil it and this releases out your potassium alum into solution. So that was the end of day two, so fine.

This morning, day three, cracking on with my boiling only to have another like heat, so-called sort of heat-resistant glass beaker just shatter on a gas burner. So it’s like all the time I was just losing bits all the way along, and I was thinking I’m just doomed to having a little tiny crumb of mineral deodorant. But, you know, Rough Science carries on, scooping up the, like pipette it off the ground literally, a benchtop extraction, I think that’s what you call it in the trade, and just keep boiling it to evaporate it.

And when I got it down quite concentrated I just laid it out on some evaporation trays, tried a couple of things, one lined with aluminium foil, one lined with a bin liner which is actually probably the more successful one because the black just absorbs the heat of the sun whereas the aluminium foil was reflecting. It was hard to tell which was more effective but we’ve got some crystallised potassium alum out on the sheets, so I was so lucky. And when that was all scraped up with a tissue into a little pot there was a lot more than I thought, so had I kind of been more successful throughout I could have really got quite a lot of this mineral deodorant. As it was I just had a few crumbs, and it sort of worked.

The point about potassium alum is that it has an astringent quality which means it closes up the pores in your armpit, it sort of puckers them up, so it does have, there was a reduction in perspiration. But the key point about the potassium alum is that it is toxic to bacteria and it’s the bacteria growing in your armpits that actually causes the body odour and the potassium alum inhibits their growth and therefore lowers your body odour.

It was difficult on the test that we did in the programme to really ascertain if it was working but I definitely had potassium alum so it’s really, if I keep it on we’ll see how it goes tomorrow. Another great end to the programme. I’m always on such a high at the end, and Mike’s chemical antiperspirant was really worked very well. Ellen’s botanical antiperspirants and deodorants, a bit like mine, a bit sort of inconclusive but I think she was pretty confident of what she’d done. And Jonathan Hare excelled again as always with his incredible washing machine, so it was a really fun afternoon this afternoon and, once again, just looking forward to the next one.