A couple of years ago I attended a barbecue thrown by a friend of mine in the States. I had nothing to do in the afternoon, so I headed over earlier to help prepare the food (half of the enjoyment is in the anticipation).
I found my friend in his back yard with an atomiser of the sort you’d use to water plants, and in the bottle was a luminous green liquid. The whole garden smelled sharply of mint. My friend is a keen gardener, so I assumed this was one of the crazy techniques he uses to grow his enormous mutant tomatoes.
‘No, it’s Listerine,‘ he told me. ‘I use it to keep away the mosquitoes.’
Listerine mosquito repellent? What the…?
Now, lemme tell you why this tickled me. Way back in the old days Listerine was originally sold as a surgical antiseptic for dentists. When that failed to make its inventors crazy rich they pretty much invented the condition of halitosis, and Listerine was one of the first products marketed to the lucrative ‘if you don’t use this you won’t get laid’ audience.
At various times Listerine has been sold as floor cleaner, a remedy for dandruff and even a cure for gonorrhoea. It has to be one of the most insanely marketed products of all time (and that’s without even mentioning the short lived Listerine cigarette campaign).
So, anyway… Listerine mosquito repellent? Yeah, that sounds about right.
As it happens, Listerine hasn’t been on a campaign to break into the mosquito repellent market. It seems that this is a trick devised by the common man, and it’s much more popular than you might think. But here’s the question: does Listerine mosquito repellent work?
Well, that’s not an easy question to answer. Here’s the thing. Listerine is mostly just water and alcohol with a little eucalyptol thrown into the mix (extract of eucalyptus to give it that minty fresh taste, and to stop your boss thinking you take vodka as a morning pick-me-up). Now, eucalyptol is often used as the active ingredient in natural mosquito repellents, as mosquitoes seem to hate the smell of eucalyptus.
So, yeah… you can kind of imagine that Listerine might do the trick as a mosquito repellent. Unfortunately, you’re forgetting about the alcohol. Have you ever cleaned a surface with pure alcohol? Go and try it, and notice how the liquid evaporates before you’ve even finished your first wipe with a cloth. Alcohol vanishes quickly.
So this is where the Listerine mosquito repellent trick falls flat on its face. Yes, the eucalyptol in the mouthwash will scare off mosquitoes, but the alcohol will cause the liquid to disperse so quickly that you’ll only be given a few minutes of protection if you spray it in an open area like your backyard.
Now, natural mosquito repellent that uses eucalyptol is a different story altogether. These sprays contain ingredients designed to hang around on your skin and clothing, so they offer protection up to a couple of hours before you have to reapply.
Back to my friend’s barbecue. You wouldn’t believe the ribs he cooked. God, I can still taste them now two years later. Perfect, tender and succulent. Almost enough to fly across the world to try them again. Did I get bitten, though? Damn right I did.
Listerine mosquito repellent? Keep it in the bathroom, buddy.
