A small part of me dreads summer in the city. Showing some skin comes with a price: Sunscreen layered with what I like to call my favorite warm-weather “fragrance:” Bug spray with DEET.
To say that mosquitoes love me is an understatement. Childhood visits to the Philippines required hotel reservations rather than staying with family because I would get eaten alive. A two-week trip to Thailand with a then-boyfriend resulted in one hospital visit and a week’s long supply of antibiotics, all because of 37 mosquito bites. I’ve even woken up to three bites on my face in the dead of winter. If those pesky little blood suckers are in my vicinity, I will be bitten.
Recently, an old study linking alcohol consumption and mosquito attraction is making its rounds on social media again. Does this mean it’s time to rethink rosé season, too?
Floyd Shockley, PhD., FRES, entomology collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, says the answer to that question is nuanced (and not just about alcohol, actually). “It’s not really the alcohol that mosquitoes are attracted to,” Dr. Shockley tells Vogue. “But because of the ways they locate and identify potential blood hosts, which all change in response to ingestion of alcohol, resulting in increased attraction.”
Female mosquitoes (they are the ones doing the biting, not males, because they need it as fuel for reproduction) bite in order to mature their eggs, Shockley says. Who they pick to feast on depends on a few things. While studies show that certain blood types, diet, and fragrances and lotions make you more attractive to insects, he says those actually play a very small role in why you get bitten. So, what is literal mosquito bait? Increased body heat, carbon dioxide output, and skin odor are the three main factors that actually make someone attractive to mosquitoes.
When one drinks, they are likely to experience one—if not all—of those changes in the body. And if you’re someone mosquitoes already love to bite before a cocktail or two, you’re certainly even more attractive with the physiological changes that come with it. “An already tasty meal will become even more irresistible,” Shockley says.
The study also shows that drinking beer has the highest degree of attraction with mosquitoes compared to other types of alcohol. But even if beer is your drink of choice, you shouldn’t be too hung up on that detail. “It’s not about the alcohol, though,” he says. “It’s about the carbonation and the fermentation, which are different between beer and other forms of alcohol.”
Shockley has some other tips to avoid being bitten: Of course, the best form of prevention is reducing skin exposure during periods of the day when mosquitoes are most active, like at dusk or at dawn. You might also want to consider wearing light colored clothing—apparently, mosquitoes find a darker fashion palette more appealing. Carrying around a portable fan can also be helpful, he says, as air movement removes CO2 and sweat while also reducing your body temperature (“Mosquitoes are [also] not great flyers and struggle to land when there is a lot of wind,” he adds).
And yes, there are essential oils, such as lavender and lemon eucalyptus oil, that have shown to be somewhat effective in warding off mosquitoes. But the gold standard, he says, will always be DEET. So I, along with everyone else, can still enjoy those outdoor summer happy hours with a glass of rosé in hand. I’ll just be sure to have my trusty DEET in the other.
