We’re currently experiencing a heat wave here in Los Angeles, so you bet we’ll be adding these ingredients to our next Prime purchase to avoid irritating and itchy insect bites. We reached out to a friend of the family, Bijou Phillips, who became a self-taught wellness guru after a health diagnosis. Below, Bijou is sharing her recipe for homemade bug spray. Be sure to bookmark this if you’re going somewhere warm for holiday or for the next bug season.
“The ingredients change depending on where I’m going. For California, where I’m typically hiking around, I love using rose geranium oil mixed with water in a spray bottle, or just rose geranium oil dotted behind my ears and on my wrists and ankles. Rose geranium is the name of a plant—it’s not a mix of rose oil and geranium oil. Rose geranium is so wonderful. It repels ticks as well as mosquitoes. I spray my dogs and horses, my kid, and myself, and I never find ticks on us. I even grow rose geranium around my house—it smells so nice and keeps bugs away from my porch. Now if you want to get really serious, such as when you are going to tick country or the mosquitoes are terrible, use this mix. It smells so good, and I use this when we go to Upstate New York in the summer.
Ingredients:
Clove oil
Rose geranium oil
Peppermint oil
Rosemary oil
Cedar oil
Cinnamon oil
Water
Glycerin
*I will add a little vanilla as well to make it smell extra delicious.
I put about 10 drops of each oil into a spray bottle and then fill it the rest of the way with water. Shake and spray all over.”