BUG BABE

Seriously pretty repellent.

A mosquito repellent you’d wear even if there were no mosquitoes.

The Bug Babe bottle resting in a pink flower pool float on turquoise water, surrounded by peach roses

VANILLA COCONUT CREAM 20% PICARIDIN NOT DEET 100 ML IN DEVELOPMENT

THE PROBLEM

Every other product on your body got a redesign. Mosquito repellent never did.

The ones that work are sticky and smell like chemicals. The natural ones smell like citronella. Either way it isn’t something you’d choose to put on your skin, so most of us put it off as long as we can.

Bug Babe is being built for the opposite reason: something you reach for because you like it, in a scent you’d wear even if it did nothing.

THE OIL

Milky pink in the bottle. Translucent on skin.

A hand holding the Bug Babe bottle above teal pool water, showing the milky pink oil inside — In the bottle. A milky pink oil with the shimmer suspended throughout.

A swatch of pink shimmer body oil on skin before it is worked in — Going on. It goes on pink and turns translucent as you work it in.

Sunlit shimmer across a collarbone and shoulder after the oil is worked in — On skin. A sheer sparkle that reads as radiance. Silky, never sticky.

THE PROCESS

Macro close-up of the pink shimmer oil on skin, fine sparkle catching the light

Seven versions to get the feel right.

Nothing like it existed, so every choice had to be made from scratch. The shimmer had to stay suspended. The finish had to dry down instead of staying sticky. It had to hold up in heat and sun.

It’s taking longer than the shortcut would have. That’s the point.

FORMULA: Seven versions with a cosmetic chemist whose previous work includes Kosas, MAC and Stila
PRODUCTION: A contract manufacturer in Los Angeles County
FRAGRANCE: A signature vanilla coconut cream, built to order by an independent fragrance house
REPELLENT: Picaridin, not DEET

THE FOUNDER

It started by a pool in Portugal.

Twenty mosquito bites in one week, on a trip I’d been planning for months. I went looking for a repellent that I’d actually want to wear and that worked. There was nothing.

I started daydreaming about what it could be, and somewhere along the way, “why not me?” became “okay, I’m really doing this now.”

Did I know that would mean taking on a years-long federal registration process? I did not. And once I found out, plenty of people suggested I skip the real repellent part and launch something easier.

But real protection is what I went looking for in the first place. Without it, what was I even making?

Oh, and just so you know how unexpected all of this is, I have a BFA in dance.

I was also a painfully shy kid who went so far as to join the mime club so she wouldn’t have to talk.

Now I’m building a mosquito repellent company and navigating the EPA.

Believe me, no one is more surprised by this plot twist than I am. Okay, maybe my parents.

But I know what I want to exist, and being told it’s hard isn’t making me want it any less.

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So here I am.

Making what I couldn’t find. Maybe you’ve been looking for it, too.

Laura 💗

meet laura

Wait, what’s picaridin?

The short version: it isn’t DEET, and it barely smells like anything. The long version is worth reading.

give me the long version

THE WAITLIST

Be first to know.

Bug Babe is still in development. Add your name and we’ll email you the moment it’s ready, before anyone else.