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In the summer of 2009 I found myself, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, driving across Central Asia in a rusty, tiny car. The weather was painfully hot and the mosquitoes swarmed. The mozzies got were so bad, in fact, that when crossing the border into Kazakhstan I was asked if I needed a doctor to treat the blistered bites covering my legs.
Throughout the trip I used a powerful DEET-based mosquito repellent. I forget the brand, but I’d heard it was the best. It worked in the car, sure, but the moment I stepped out the mosquitoes descended. After a couple of weeks on the road I noticed something unusual about the interior of the car: the plastic dashboard was blistered and cracked.
It’s hot, I thought, but not that hot!
It was only weeks later that I realised the culprit was the mosquito repellent. DEET, it seems, is a harsh solvent that can melt through plastic. I was shocked. If this stuff can melt through plastic just imagine what it could do to my skin!
It was then that I decided to switch to natural mosquito repellent. Never again would I use harsh chemicals to deter mosquitoes – from now on it would be natural all the way.
Fighting Mosquitoes with Natural Repellent
My journey of discovery into the world of natural mosquito repellent was long and hard. I live in balmy northern Thailand at the moment, and here the mosquitoes are an unpleasant fact of life (you can read more about sharing a life with mosquitoes in my article about how to treat mosquito bites). If I wanted to find a natural mosquito repellent that actually did the job, I knew I’d have to wade through at least a few that did absolutely nothing, leaving me wide open to hordes of mozzies.
The first thing I learned about natural mosquito repellent is that the industry is packed full of snake oil salesmen. There are few controls and regulations governing the business of DEET-free mosquito repellent, and as long as a manufacturer can prove that their repellent doesn’t have harmful effects they can make any claim they please.
In fact, the first natural non-DEET-based mosquito repellent I ever bought, an odd tube full of goo I found in a chemist in rural India, turned out to be homeopathic. If you’ve never come across homeopathy I suggest you look it up. This particular repellent claimed to offer the protection of essence of citronella but, thanks to my lack of Urdu reading ability, I’d finished the tube before realising that this particular repellent contained about as much citronella oil as you’d find in a hamburger: i.e. zero (or as close to zero as makes no difference).
Now this sort of thing really pisses me off. I know that millions of people around the world believe in homeopathic remedies, but I prefer to ground my beliefs in silly things like facts and evidence. It annoys me to have to sift through a thousand mosquito repellents to find the ones that actually contain useful ingredients.
It pisses me off more than anything that these products are allowed on sale at all. Mosquito repellent is serious business. Malaria kills millions of people around the world each year, and dengue fever, West Nile virus and a dozen other mosquito-borne diseases just add to the death toll. My girlfriend and I have both suffered through bouts of dengue, and malaria came within a hair’s breadth of killing my older brother. We’re not messing around here. Mosquitoes are the most deadly creatures on the planet by an enormous margin. These tiny insects cause untold misery, pain and heartache, and offering repellents that don’t actually work should be a crime.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the CEO of any company that manufactures repellent should be required to expose him/herself to malaria-carrying mosquitoes with only their own repellent for protection. A little harsh? Maybe, but I’ve seen too many of my friends and family suffer to take the subject lightly.
Anyway…
After a hell of a lot of trial and error I managed to narrow down to a list of the 5 best natural mosquito repellent solutions: some for your body and some for your home and garden. All of these natural mosquito repellents have my personal seal of approval. I’m sure that doesn’t count for much, but as long as I’m bite-free I’m laughing.
The Top 5 Natural Mosquito Repellent Solutions
All Terrain Herbal Armor Natural Mosquito Repellent
OK, here’s the big one. For the All Terrain test I headed out on a week long trip into the countryside for camping, and I was so worried I almost took along a DEET based spray. Once you’re out in the deep woods you really don’t want to have to come home because you’re covered in nasty bites.
Well, I’m glad I trusted All Terrain. Even in the deepest rainforest of Thailand – a place where you have to ask the permission of the local mosquito elders to pass through their territory – I hardly got any bites. Sure, there were some, but I don’t think that was because I was using a natural mosquito repellent rather than a chemical spray. I think it was just that, when you’re up against millions of hungry mosquitoes over the course of a week, at least a few are gonna slip through the defences.
Since my camping trip I’ve been using All Terrain daily. I never expected to find a natural mosquito repellent that was so effective. I always just assumed that by shunning DEET I was resigning myself to a life of annoying bites.
I’m really glad that’s not the case.
Amazon Lights Mosquito Repellent Incense Sticks
I love a good BBQ, and here in Thailand we get the weather for it almost every day (apart from the odd, unannounced torrential downpour). The only problem with BBQing a couple of times a week is the constant mosquito threat (and finding the little buggers in your beer).
Amazon Lights incense sticks create a perfect impenetrable barrier for your garden – just set a few up in a perimeter and the mosquitoes won’t dare cross the line.
The sticks burn for about 2, maybe 2 and a half hours before they’re finished, so you should be able to get a good party going before it’s time to step back indoors. I used these just last week, and a quick informal survey of my drunken guests as they filed out of the garden proved that they worked like a charm!
California Baby Bug Repellent Spray
This repellent is designed specifically for use on children, but I’d thought I’d give it a go anyway to see how it differed from the others. I have quite sensitive skin, so I reasoned that a child-oriented natural mosquito repellent might be a little kinder on my poor old epidermis.
California Baby is actually one of my favourites, and the only reason it’s way down in the the third spot is because of the price – about three times higher tan some other natural mosquito repellents. The spray has a Skin Deep rating of zero, which means that you could pretty much bathe in this stuff without any ill effects. It’s completely non-toxic and, best of all, it seems to do the job perfectly.
If you’ve got kids and you want to keep them bite free I’d happily recommend California Baby – if only they’d bring down the price a little it’d be my daily spray.
Loving Naturals Organic DEET-Free Mosquito Repellent
My sister recommended this one to me, as she’s been using Loving Naturals products for as long as I remember. This natural mosquito repellent is packed full of witch hazel extract, so as well as fighting off the bugs it also soothes already bitten skin.
My favourite thing about this spray was actually the aroma. Most natural mosquito repellent sprays smells nice (as opposed to DEET based repellents, which usually smell like a chemical toilet), but Loving Naturals just has something about it that I love. I think it’s the citronella.
In any case, Loving Naturals does a reasonable job of keeping away the mosquitoes. It ain’t perfect, and there are certainly more effective repellents out there, but sometimes I’m happy to put up with the occasional bite just so I can use a repellent that smells OK (I know, call me crazy).
Burt’s Bees Natural Mosquito Repellent
This is a bit of a tricky one, as you’ll see if you read the reviews on Amazon. I used Burt’s Bees repellent for a couple of weeks earlier in the year in our old third floor apartment, and I definitely noticed a huge reduction in mosquito bites.
However, I also noticed that my apartment suddenly became a popular hangout for thousands of ants! It seems that ants loooove the smell of Burt’s Bees (or one of its ingredients, at least) and they come swarming as soon as you spray it on. We had ants on every surface, and since my partner is disgusted by the sight of them the cure was worse than the disease.
So, while I loved how effective the repellent was on mosquitoes, I decided the trade-off wasn’t worth it. A great repellent with a fatal flaw.