Bug & Tick Spray or Hand Sanitizer?

Welcome to May 2020. 

If you had been in a coma and just woke up, you wouldn’t recognize the world.  You can’t get a handshake, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a hot meal in a restaurant, or a roll of toilet paper.  But you do see kids playing outside enjoying life….so that’s good.  But I digress.

Here at Alara Ridge Farm, life isn’t much different than normal.  Farm life is a little like a lifestyle of quarantine, now that I think about it.  We are working hard here to bring you the very best products to make your life a little better…..a little more normal.  We might not be able to get your toilet paper, but we can help with other things.

We’re here to help!

You probably know that we make premium CBD oils and products from family-grown, family processed hemp.  Hopefully, you’re one of our customers and you’ve seen for yourself that our oils are among the best out there for the lowest price.  But I’ve got something else to share with you that I bet you didn’t know.  In fact, I know you didn’t know because I didn’t know either.

You may have a bottle of our All-Natural Bug & Tick Spray on your shelf right now.  I know I’m biased, but our Bug & Tick Spray really is great.  First of all, IT WORKS.  But beyond that, it’s nontoxic so you can feel good about using it on yourself and your family.  What you and I both didn’t know, I’m going to explain below.

The Experiment

I (Lori) have been working on developing a natural, non-toxic hand sanitizer for the community since we live in a time that hand sanitizer is nowhere to be found.  You probably know there are countless websites out there with DIY hand sanitizer recipes.  I read those websites, looked at the research for which ingredients were supposed to work, and then came up with 7 combinations I wanted to try to see how they worked. 

Remember back in microbiology class when you would swab surfaces and grow stuff on those little agar plates?  Well, those skills finally came in handy in real life!  I bought some of those and got to work.

Procedures

For my control, I needed to come up with something as gross as possible.  Have you ever watched what kids do with their hands?  If you haven’t, don’t.  Seriously.  But I’ve got 3 little kids so I see it all the time. As luck would have it, they were all playing outside when I got ready to start my experiment, so I had them come in for a minute.  I had them get their hands wet to loosen whatever nastiness was living on those little phalanges, and then I had them rub their hands all over a countertop.  Gross, I know.  Oh, the pains I will go to for the art of science! (You can stop laughing now.)

So I let that dry and then marked off 8 areas (and then at the end I added a 9th area because I thought of something else I wanted to add).  The first was my control.  I moistened a sterile swab with boiled water and rubbed it all over the control box.  Then I took my 7 formulations of supposed hand sanitizers and sprayed them in each corresponding box (while guarding the neighboring boxes).  I used a clean paper towel to rub the solutions around in the boxes and then let them sit several minutes until dry. 

Here are the ingredients of each potential hand sanitizer spray, in order of greatest amount to least:

• #1 – 70% Isopropyl Alcohol + Glycerin + Thieves Essential Oil Blend
• #2 – Alara Ridge Farm All-Natural Bug & Tick Spray
• #3 – Distilled White Vinegar 5% + Witch Hazel + Tea Tree Oil + Lavender Oil
• #4 – Witch Hazel + Thieves Essential Oil Blend + Lavender
• #5 – Water + Castile Soap + Tea Tree Oil
• #6 – Apple Cider Vinegar + Lavender + Tea Tree Oil
• #7 – 91% Isopropyl Alcohol + Glycerin + Thieves Essential Oil Blend
• 8th add on at the side – Thieves Household Cleaner (1 tsp concentrate + 15oz water)

Once dry, using the same procedure as I did for the control, I swabbed each box and inoculated the agar plates.  Just for fun, I went ahead and swabbed a few surfaces I knew were likely disgusting just to see what happened.  I took samples from the following and applied them to a few more agar plates:

• the toilet handle in the kids’ bathroom,
• the front door handle
• the refrigerator door
• my cell phone
• my mouth
• my nostril
• my hand

I placed the plates inside of a large black sock (to keep them in the dark) and put them under one of our grow lights that gets particularly warm because it’s the most consistently warm place I have in the house given the cooler temperatures this week.  I left it there for 2 days.

The Results

Fast forward 48 hours, and I can’t tell you how surprised I was!  For some, I was VERY surprised.  The plates with isopropyl alcohol, even the one with 91%, ALL had growth!!! Also, the Thieves Household Cleaner which I LOVE and use regularly had growth, so that was disappointing (maybe I need to increase the concentration?).  You can take a minute here to notice how disturbingly colonized my cell phone is…..wow……  Also, my kids’ toilet isn’t as bad as I thought.  That’s not the point, though.

Guess which plate had ZERO growth.  Not even one colony.  The plate that was from our All-Natural Bug & Tick Spray!!!  And another mix of just ACV, lavender, and tea tree oil!. See for yourself.

Limitations

Obviously there are limitations to my experiment.  I did not identify what organisms were in my sample, so I don’t know for sure what types of microbes the Bug & Tick Spray will kill. I don’t know if there were viruses present.  All I know is that whatever nasty stuff my kids had picked up doing what kids do, it killed them all.  That’s pretty compelling to this mom/nurse/midwife brain.  I also didn’t control for individual ingredients, so I can’t say exactly what was the most effective one.  I will say that I hypothesize it is the apple cider vinegar, because the plate that was just ACV, lavender, and tea tree oil also had no growth.  But then again, lavender and tea tree oil are also both in my Bug & Tick Spray, so it could be those, too.  They both are known to have antimicrobial effects.

This isn’t a high-dollar backed, big fancy laboratory experiment.  That is abundantly clear.  But it is a compelling look at a product you might actually already have (or you could get if you’re one of the few that hasn’t tried it) that potentially can serve more than one purpose so it’s one less thing to keep up with. 

Decide for yourself

I can’t guarantee you anything [but neither can the person who told you wearing a simple cloth mask will protect you from the coronavirus (Pro tip: it won’t)], and I make NO CLAIMS about the efficacy of this product for anything. While the results I got here are interesting, they are far from definitive. Big, rich scientists from big drug companies with big ol’ buildings would decry this level of evidence, so keep that in mind.

I dare say if you’re reading this you’re a mom or dad just trying to do the best you can for your kids as naturally and affordably as possible.  You probably know there’s no such thing as a risk-free world and you can make decisions for yourself. So, if you’re like me and now you’re gonna keep your Bug & Tick Spray in your purse so that you’ve got it with you to use for either warding off “skeeters” (read: mosquitos, for any non-Southerners reading this) or warding off the bugs hanging out on your kids’ hands and your too, then head over to our shop and order yours before it’s gone. 

Don’t Wait!

We’re making it as fast as we can, but keep in mind we’re a small operation and we make other things, too, so resources are limited while we grow.  At the time of this writing, I currently only have 40 bottles in stock. It’s a bit difficult to acquire all the ingredients these days, so my ability to make more is dependent on a shaky supply chain.  Just keep that in mind.  Don’t miss your chance to have NON-TOXIC, NATURAL Bug & Tick Spray AND hand sanitizer, all in one!

Use promo code “COMBO” to get $1.50 off when you buy both Bug & Tick Spray and Bites and BooBoos Roll-On in the same purchase.

Some good news…

And a little good news to wrap up, I know our current online store in combination with our website blog is easy to get lost and not the most user-friendly site out there, but our new shop is just about done and will be open VERY soon!

What are your thoughts?? I’d love to hear what you think! Comment below! I read all the comments that are posted!