So, that was the secret ?
If your summer evenings are always ruined by mosquitoes, you might want to rethink your choice of fragrance. Scientists have shown that popular Victoria’s Secret perfume, Bombshell, can actually repel mosquitoes effectively for up to 2 hours.
While it isn’t anywhere near as effective as products containing DEET – one of the most common active ingredients in insect repellents – in high doses, the perfume was better than a range of ‘organic’ mosquito repellents on the market.
In the study, published in the Journal of Insect Science last year, the team tested the Victoria’s Secret fragrance up against 10 commercially available mosquito repellents, as well as Avon’s Skin So Soft bath oil.
To figure out which ones mosquitoes were or weren’t into, they took a volunteer and doused her hand in either perfume, bath oil, a repellent, or left it clean, and then placed it under a Y-shaped tube, which fanned the fragrance up to a group of around 20 mosquitoes.
If the mosquitoes were attracted to the hand, they’d move into one part of the tube, if they weren’t, they’d stay where they are or move into the other part.
The team used two different mosquitoes species – the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti), which is known to carry Zika virus in some parts of the world, and the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) which can transmit dengue fever and chikungunya. All things you want to avoid.
But for up to 2 hours, the Victoria’s Secret fragrance Bombshell also kept mosquitoes away, as did the Avon bath oil – although the bath oil only repelled one out of the two species of mosquitoes tested, while Bombshell repelled both.
To be clear, in the experiment, a whole lot of Bombshell perfume was doused onto the volunteer’s hand – around 0.5 mL – and the researchers explain that in normal concentrations, the fragrance probably wouldn’t have the same effect.
So the bottom line is, don’t go and replace your mosquito repellent for perfume any time soon. But the team did also gleaned some useful information out of the research, which aimed to provide consumers better advice when buying repellents.
That’s especially important with the rise of diseases such as zika virus and yellow fever spreading in tropical regions.
So why would a Victoria’s Secret perfume repel insects? More research needs to be done before we have an answer to that question, but the scientists hypothesise that it’s less to do with the ingredients in the perfume and more to do with the fact that it masked the natural smell of the volunteer – which is what attracts the insects in the first place.
Oh, and in case you were wondering why the researchers selected a Victoria’s Secret perfume out of all the perfumes available? It turns out it was a happy accident.
“We tested VS Bombshell because one of our test subjects had gotten it as a birthday present, so it was a completely random pick,” one of the researchers, Immo Hansen, told Today.
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