The Camping Best-Seller List Is Mostly Bug Spray
Five of the top eight camping best-sellers are insect repellent. That is worth reading as information about camping, not about repellent.
Skaði came down from the mountains to pick a husband and got the wrong man because she chose by looking at feet. The lesson has held up: you can study the wrong part of the problem very carefully and still get it wrong.
What the chart actually says
Amazon’s camping and hiking best-seller list is ranked by units sold and it updates through the day, so it is a reasonable picture of what people are buying right now rather than what a magazine thinks they should buy.
Here is the top eight, today. Ice packs at one. Picaridin lotion at two. Picaridin spray at three. Repellent bracelets at four. Ice packs again at five, a microfiber towel at six, permethrin at seven, DEET at eight.
Five of the top eight are insect repellent.
That is not a fact about repellent. It is a fact about camping — specifically, that the thing most likely to send people home early is not the tent, the stove or the sleeping bag they spent a fortnight researching. It is the bugs. Nobody writes a gear guide about that because there is no interesting gear in it.
The three that work do different jobs
The useful thing to notice is that the three effective products on that list are not competitors. They cover different ground:
- Picaridin goes on skin and does not eat plastic. It is the default if you are only carrying one thing.
- Permethrin goes on fabric, days ahead, and stays there through washes. It is the tick answer.
- DEET goes on skin, works on everything, and will quietly ruin a watch face.
Somebody who camps a lot ends up with the fabric treated and one skin product in the bag. Somebody who camps twice a year buys one can and it is usually the right call.
Where these picks came from, honestly
Straight off Amazon’s own chart, with the rank, star rating and review count read today. We do not own any of the four, and we are not going to pretend otherwise — this is a piece about what a sales chart tells you, and the honest version of that is: here is what is selling, here is what the evidence says about each one, decide for yourself.
That includes the bracelets. They are a genuine top-five best-seller and we are telling you they do not work well, because “it sells enormously” and “it works” are separate claims and a list that never separates them is not worth reading.
The one honest warning
Repellent is the most likely thing to be forgotten and the least likely to be improvised. There is no camp workaround for it — you cannot borrow it from the stove kit or fashion it out of a tarp. It is also the cheapest item in any camping bag by a wide margin.
If a trip has one box to tick before leaving, this is the box.
The picks
Sawyer Premium Insect Repellent, 20% picaridin lotion
Number two on Amazon's whole camping and hiking chart, 4.6 stars across nearly twenty-five thousand ratings. Picaridin is the reason to look at it: it works about as well as DEET on mosquitoes and ticks, and unlike DEET it does not soften plastics, so it will not haze a watch crystal, a phone case or the coating on sunglasses. The lotion rather than the spray means you can put it exactly where you want it in a tent without everyone tasting it.
- Best for
- Anyone who has ruined a pair of sunglasses or a watch strap with DEET, and anyone applying repellent to a child.
- Watch out
- Lotion is slower to apply than an aerosol. On a group of four impatient people at a trailhead that difference is real, and it is the reason people go back to the can.
Sawyer Permethrin for clothing, gear and tents
Forty-two thousand ratings at 4.6, and it is the one on this list most people have never heard of, because it is not skin repellent. You treat the clothes, not yourself, and the treatment survives several washes. This is the standard tick answer, and ticks are the thing on a camping trip actually worth being careful about.
- Best for
- Tick country, long grass, and anyone who camps often enough to keep a dedicated set of camp clothes.
- Watch out
- It goes on fabric, never skin, and it has to dry fully before you wear it — plan it the day before you leave, not in the car park. It is also genuinely toxic to cats while wet, which matters if you treat clothes at home.
OFF! Deep Woods, DEET aerosol
Number eight on the chart, 4.7 stars across forty-two thousand ratings — the highest average of any repellent in the top ten. DEET is the old standard and it still works. Nothing on this list beats it for a swarm, and the two-pack is the version that ends up in the truck and stays there.
- Best for
- Bad evenings near standing water, and anyone who wants the thing that has worked since the sixties and does not want a discussion about it.
- Watch out
- It attacks plastics and synthetic fabrics. Keep it off watch faces, phone screens, fishing line and anything with a printed logo, because it will lift it.
Cliganic mosquito repellent bracelets
This is on the list as an honest warning, not a recommendation. It sits at number four on the camping chart with thirty-seven thousand ratings, and it has the lowest average of any repellent in the top ten at 4.2. Wearable repellents protect the small volume of air immediately around the band; independent testing has repeatedly found they do not protect an arm, let alone a person.
- Best for
- A back-garden barbecue where nobody minds a bite, or as a supplement to something that actually works.
- Watch out
- The failure mode is the problem — you feel covered, so you skip the repellent that would have worked. If it is going to be one or the other, it should not be this.
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