TikTok Has Brought Skin So Soft as Bug Repellent Back
Reading Time: 4 minutesBut did the bath oil ever work against mosquitos?, Does Skin So Soft as bug repellent work?
The ’90s are back: We’re wearing claw clips, jelly sandals, and—according to some corners of TikTok—slathering on Avon bath oil in an attempt to keep our skin free of bug bites.
The exact product is known as Skin So Soft, and despite being made literally for the bath, it has been thought to be a solid mosquito repellent for decades. In 1982, a group of researchers at the Letterman Army Institute of Research in San Francisco wrote about the use case for Mosquito News. They had learned via ‘person-to-person channels’ that the Avon product was ‘widely used as a mosquito repellent’ (rough translation: ‘the rumor mill says everyone’s doing it’). They weren’t the only ones.
‘We get this a lot, this has been going on forever,’ Susan Small, a public relations manager for Avon, told me, adding that the company makes no claim that the bath oil repels bugs. But the idea that it does has been so persistent over the years that Avon eventually capitalized on the situation and launched a line of Skin So Soft Bug Guard products containing picaridin. ‘I find it all very charming,’ says Small of the enduring Skin So Soft/mosquito chatter. ‘Hey, it’s brand exposure.’
I will tell you right now: You will not be getting a charming anecdote in this piece about this writer replacing her bug spray with bath oil—give me DEET forever. But despite this fact—and Avon’s protests—data shows that Skin So Soft can ward off mosquitoes. At least, to some extent.
The Army Institute researchers tried out Skin So Soft by putting it on the arms of three (presumably deranged) volunteers, fastening cages of mosquitos to their arms, and then counting how often the mosquitos bit the treated skin. They found that it did protect against mosquitos, though not as well as DEET. Others have since come to a similar conclusion. Consumer Reports has put the bath oil to the test against other bug repellents, in both 1993 and more recently, finding that it provided about 2 hours of protection against mosquitos. ‘That would put it among the worst-performing insect repellents we tested: The products we recommend generally protect for upward of 5 or 6 hours,’ CR reporter Catherine Roberts wrote.
Still! Two hours of protection is a surprising amount for a seemingly random household product. ‘It doesn’t totally not work,’ said Roberts, laughing, when I called her to discuss. She updated CR’s coverage of Skin So Soft bath oil this spring, after her partner noticed it continued to be recommended on message boards as a good product to take camping. She does not recommend this. ‘That is an instance where you need your bug repellent to last for several hours,’ says Roberts. ‘It’s not going to cut it.’
But in the shorter term, it can make a difference. Immo Hansen, a professor of biology at New Mexico State University, similarly found that it worked pretty well for half an hour to two hours at repelling mosquitos—the bugs were placed in a tube, and had the option to fly toward volunteers—as he and his team reported in a 2015 paper in the Journal of Insect Science. (‘Pretty well’ as compared to a control scenario where the volunteers wore nothing on their skin.) Weirdly, Victoria’s Secret Bombshell perfume, which Hansen’s team had tested because they thought it might attract mosquitos, outperformed Skin So Soft bath oil, though DEET outperformed both the perfume and the oil. Not all studies have found that Skin So Soft works even passably well. A 2002 New England Journal of Medicine paper reported that Skin So Soft protected volunteers who put their arms into a cage of ‘unfed mosquitos’ for a paltry 9.6 minutes.
It’s probably something in the Skin So Soft bath oil fragrance that’s putting off the bugs, says Hansen, who published a paper in January 2023 comparing the effectiveness of various essential oils against mosquitoes. After all, mosquitoes find us by smelling the carbon dioxide we breathe out, and the breakdown of sweat on our skin. Bug repellents attach to their smell receptors, and interfere with that process—and voilà, they leave us alone. It’s not clear what component of Skin So Soft bath oil is doing the trick, though further study could identify it. Hansen says that kind of chemical analysis might be frowned upon by the makers of Avon, who probably want to keep their best-selling formula under wraps. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the exact formula for the fragrances in a bath oil can shift without Avon changing the label, so the effectiveness of Skin So Soft against bugs may even change over the years. Your mileage will also probably vary based on how attracted mosquitos are to you in the first place.
The best thing to use against bugs is undoubtedly something containing picaridin, or DEET, which is what Hansen personally uses. But he keeps studying other options because, even though it’s safe, people just don’t like DEET; it smells bad, it sounds scary. Which is probably why Skin So Soft bath oil has endured as a hack for so many years. I asked Hansen for the bottom line—if it was OK to use it. As long as you’re not headed somewhere where you’re at risk of catching malaria, he replied, ‘Yeah, why not?’
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/skin-so-soft-bug-repellent-does-it-work.html
Ref: slate
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