Mosquitoes always go for me and leave the guy next to me alone

I'm the reason nobody else at the cookout gets bitten. — Cookout guest, 1951

In a three-year Rockefeller University study from 2022, volunteers wore nylon stockings on their arms and mosquitoes got to pick. One volunteer, called Subject 33, drew about 100 times more than the least popular one, and never lost the lead. The ones mosquitoes loved had more of certain acids in their skin oil. Skin bacteria turn those into the smell mosquitoes like. So it's not in your head. You're on the menu. One study, one kind of mosquito. The fix is DEET. It muddles the smells a mosquito hunts by. You still smell better than the next guy. It just has trouble finding you.

Almost: it only works while it's on, and each product's label says when to put it back.

The full file

The hunt for a better repellent started in 1942 at a small Agriculture Department field lab in Orlando, set up to keep disease-carrying insects off soldiers. The Army's first DEET was 75% DEET in alcohol. The troops called it bug juice. Testing in Orlando in 1952 confirmed it did the job.

Then for about 50 years nobody could say exactly how it worked. In 2019 researchers found that mosquitoes taste DEET with their feet. They took mosquitoes already bred so they couldn't smell DEET, glued over the taste sensors on their legs, and those fed on a DEET-covered arm without a second thought. Leave one leg free and the mosquito wouldn't land.

The Subject 33 team also tried mosquitoes with broken smell genes, hoping they couldn't find people at all. They found people anyway. The EPA has reviewed DEET twice, in 1998 and 2014, and found no health concern when it's used as the label says. So the mosquito will find you. Your job is to taste bad when it lands.