A good cyber-friend of mine, Dabs, has allergies to most chemicals so she's always got loads of tips about alternative products to use in the home and for personal care. However I was somewhat surprised when she told me recently that she used Listerine to keep mosquitos away just spraying it into the space around her.
'Apparently mosquitos don't like Listerine much.' she told me.
Now, I had always thought of Listerine as a very chemical sort of product so determined to find out more, very soon I was Googling and Wiki-ing madly to discover everything I could about it.
According to Wikipedia, Listerine was invented in the 19th century as a powerful surgical antiseptic and was later sold, in a very distilled form, as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea! But it wasn't a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "chronic halitosis", the faux medical term that the Listerine advertising group created in 1921 to describe bad breath.
The original formula of Listerine is still being used and according to http://www.listerine.co.uk, Listerine contains a fixed combination of four essential oils—eucalyptol, menthol, methyl salicylate, and thymol.
On balance I think I'll just stick to a more traditional aromatherapy recipe for repelling insects combining rubbing alcohol, witch hazel, vodka, or olive oil with an insect-repelling essential oils—such as citronella, eucalyptus or clove— in a spray bottle.
Contrary to popular belief, a New England Journal of Medicine study found oil of eucalyptus at 30% concentration prevented mosquito bites for 2 hours while the more commonly-used Citronella oil warded off bugs for only 20 minutes. However Thai lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus) also contains citronella and is considered more effective than true citronella as an insect repellent. Clove oil should be used sparingly as it can be a skin irritant.
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