Insect repellent
substance which repels insects
An insect repellent (also commonly called "bug spray" or "bug deterrent") is a substance applied to the skin, clothing, or other surfaces to discourage insects (and arthropods in general) from landing or climbing on that surface. Insect repellents help prevent and control the outbreak of insect-borne (and other arthropod-borne) diseases such as malaria, Lyme disease, dengue fever, bubonic plague, river blindness, and West Nile fever. Pest animals commonly serving as vectors for disease include insects such as flea, fly, and mosquito; and arachnids such as ticks .
Some insect repellents are insecticides (bug killers), but most simply discourage insects and send them flying or crawling away.
Effectiveness
Synthetic repellents tend to be more effective and/or longer lasting than "natural" repellents.
For protection against ticks and mosquito bites, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends DEET, icaridin (picaridin, KBR 3023), oil of lemon eucalyptus (OLE), para-menthane-diol (PMD), IR3535 and 2-undecanone with the caveat that higher percentages of the active ingredient provide longer protection.
In 2015, researchers at New Mexico State University tested 10 commercially available products for their effectiveness at repelling mosquitoes. The known active ingredients tested included DEET (at various concentrations), geraniol, p-menthane-3-8-diol (found in lemon eucalyptus oil), thiamine, and several oils (soybean, rosemary, cinnamon, lemongrass, citronella, and lemon eucalyptus). Two of the products tested were fragrances where the active ingredients were unknown. On the mosquito Aedes aegypti, only one repellent that did not contain DEET had a strong effect for the duration of the 240 minutes test: a lemon eucalyptus oil repellent.
“Insect repellent” enters the record as substance which repels insects. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Insect, repellent and substance can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123682686. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Insect repellent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.