The soap you use can make you attractive to mosquitoes

Why mosquitoes attack some people and infect others remains a mystery. Now, a new study suggests that the scent of soap, combined with the personal scent of some individuals, can attract or repel mosquitoes.

Details of the study, conducted by scientists from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Virginia Tech, were published Wednesday in the journal iScience.

The research revealed that an individual, extremely attractive to mosquitoes when not washed, “can become even more attractive to mosquitoes with one soap, and repulsive to mosquitoes with another,” summarizes lead author and neuroethologist Clément Vinauger.

The mosquitoes They don’t just feed on blood. In fact, its main source of food is plant nectarso use it aromas derived from or imitating plants may influence your decision.

To find out, the team described the smells chemicals issued by four volunteers without washing and after washing with four brands of soap: Dial, Dove, Native and Simple Truth.

They also described odor profiles soaps.

They found that each volunteer emitted their own odor profile, some more attractive to mosquitoes than others, and that the use of soap significantly changed these odor profiles.

“Everyone smells different, even after applying soap; yours physiological stateyour lifestyle, what you eat and the places you go affect the way you smell,” explains Chloé Lahondère, a biologist and co-author of the study.

“And soaps drastically change the way we smell, not just by adding them chemical substancesbut also causes variations in the emission of compounds which we already naturally produce,” he states.

Before and after using soap

The researchers compared each volunteer’s attraction to mosquitoes. Aedes aegypti without washing and an hour after using soap and always with female mosquitoes, which feed on blood after mating with males.

He experiment found that washing with soap affected the preferences from mosquitoes, but differently for different types of soap and volunteers.

Washing with Dove and Simple Truth increased the attractiveness of some (but not all) volunteers, and washing with Native soap repelled mosquitoes.

“What really matters to mosquitoes is not the most abundant chemical, but the specific associations and combinations of chemicals, not only from soaps, but also from our personal body odors,” says Vinauger.

In fact, although all four soaps contained limonene – known natural repellent-, the three increased attractiveness from mosquitoes.

And that is that “the ratios of chemical substances are extremely important in determining whether mosquitoes are attracted or not,” adds Lahondère.

Coconut scent to repel mosquitoes

The next step was to analyze the chemical composition of different soaps according to their influence on mosquito preferences.

Thus, they identified four chemical substances associated with mosquito attraction and three associated with mosquitoes refusalamong the latter, a chemical substance with the smell of coconut which is a key component American bourbon i.a floral compound used for treatment scabies and ears.

The team intends to expand them results and find some samples or the general rules of testing more varieties soap and use more volunteersand also plans to study how long the effect of the soap lasts.