Sawyer Bug Repellant

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from Brigade Quartermasters

Sawyer Broad Spectrum Mosquito/Insect Repellant
Reviewed by: Bill Ames
Where to buy: REI, Outdoors Stores, link above
Cost: $6.00

After the Marines got eaten alive in the jungles of World War II, the war department spared no expense in a frantic effort to find what would repel mosquitoes and other disease carrying and annoying insects. They tested tens of thousands of compounds, and over the years have never stopped searching for a better insect repellant. The answer was deet, or diethyl-m-toluamide, back in the 40s, and it's still the answer today.

While I can't tell you anything about other bugs, I can say a bit about how it works with mosquitoes. The way it works is not how a lot of people think; that is, it doesn't actually 'repel' the bugs--it works more like camouflage.

Mosquitos are attracted to warm, moist carbon dioxide, which we humans expel through our mouths and our skin. They do this with special receptors that are as useful to a bug as our eyes are to us. Deet works like pepper spray to mosquitos--it blinds their receptors, so they can't follow you. If they happen to bump into you, they might still bite you, but without the right warm, moist CO2, they're not so sure you're edible, so they tend to just crawl around.

It's not important to cover your whole body with repellant, but you do need to create a masking effect, or a cloud, so to speak, and some careful application in the right places is all you need. First though, there are a few bad things about deet. 1) It eats away plastic, so be careful around your watch, compass and other plastic gear. 2) It irritates skin and it's not so great a thing to be bathing in. Use only enough deet to do the job, and avoid putting it on your face and hands. I like to put a bit of it on my clothes, a squirt on the back of my neck, and a healthy dose on my legs. That seems to do the trick for me. Getting it on your face or in your eyes doesn't help hide you from the bugs, so you needn't bother.

There is a common myth that Skin So Soft and other over the counter products are used by 'those marines in the know', but this is pure BS. There's nothing that proves that anything is as effective against mosquitoes as deet (maybe other bugs, but I can't speak to that--just mosquitoes!). If there was, it would certainly be issued.

As far as brands go, I really like the Sawyer Broad Spectrum, because it does seem to do a better job on bugs other than mosquitoes, such as black flies. They can be equally annoying. Sawyer's Maxi-Deet is also nice, containing a higher percentage of deet than a lot of other brands, but I think the maxi might be overkill for a lot of situations. As I said above, it's not good to use too much of this stuff.

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