Does Cilantro Essential Oil Repel Insects? Lab vs Real Life

A bottle of cilantro essential oil is not a mosquito or tick repellent, and we do not sell it as one. There is a laboratory paper in which coriander oil kept mosquitoes off treated skin for more than an hour, and that paper is worth reading closely, because what it tested is a long way from a product you can rely on in a place where insects carry disease.

Cilantro Essential Oil bottle

Cilantro Essential Oil

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What the lab study actually did

Benelli et al., Parasitology Research, 2013 studied essential oil from the fruits (seed) of Coriandrum sativum against the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus. The oil was 83.6% linalool. Against larvae, the LC50 was 421 ppm and the LC90 531.7 ppm. In the repellence trials on skin, the RD50 was 0.0001565 µL per cm2 and the RD90 0.002004 µL per cm2, and at the highest dose, 0.2 µL per cm2, the protection time was "higher than 60 min". The authors say the findings "could be useful for the development of new and safer products."

Reasoning from that abstract, here is what it does and does not give a buyer:

The dose arithmetic that matters for a skin product

The 0.2 µL per cm2 dose is measured as oil on skin. Spread over a 100 cm2 patch, that is 20 µL, or on the common assumption of 20 drops per ml (our ordinary maths, drop size varies), about 0.4 of a drop on a patch the size of a hand. That sounds tiny, but it is undiluted oil. Our shop page gives 0.5% to 2% in a carrier for skin, roughly 3 to 12 drops per ounce. If you put 0.2 µL of a 2% blend on each cm2, the oil dose is 0.004 µL per cm2, fifty times lower than the lab's protective dose and about double the paper's RD90 figure, with no data for how long that would last. The paper does not tell us whether a diluted, leaf-oil, real-world application would protect for ten minutes or not at all. That is why "it worked in a dish and on skin in the lab" and "it will protect you" are different sentences.

A second lab paper that points the other way

A 2026 paper in Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology screened essential oils from eight plants, coriander among them, for larvicidal potential against Aedes aegypti, Anopheles stephensi and Culex quinquefasciatus larvae. The authors picked the eucalyptus oil as showing "good efficacy" and built their nanoformulation on that one (Kanniappan et al., 2026). The abstract gives no coriander figures, so we cannot say how it ranked, and it studied larvae in water, not adults biting a person. We cite it for one narrow reason: when researchers compare several oils, coriander is a participant, not a standout, and a single favourable paper (Benelli 2013) does not settle it. Different species, doses and methods make the two papers hard to line up, which is itself the point: there is no standardised, repeated result a seller could point to.

It also helps to know why short protection times matter. A repellent works only while enough active material sits on the skin, and volatile oils leave the skin surface quickly; that last clause is our reasoning from the oils being volatile, not a figure from the paper. Whatever the exact minutes, the gap between "protected" and "bitten" opens quietly, and in a region with disease-carrying mosquitoes you only learn about the gap afterwards.

The regulatory half of the answer

In the US a product sold to repel insects is a pesticide under federal law, and the rules differ from cosmetics. The CDC lists the active ingredients it recommends: DEET, picaridin, IR3535, oil of lemon eucalyptus and PMD, and 2-undecanone. It tells readers to look for an EPA registration number, which "means the company provided EPA with technical information on the effectiveness of the product," and says "We do not know the effectiveness of non-EPA registered insect repellents, including some natural repellents" (CDC, mosquito bite prevention).

EPA has a separate route, called 25(b), for minimum-risk products that need no registration. It has conditions: the active ingredients must be only those in a list at 40 CFR 152.25(f)(1), every ingredient must be on the label, and the label "cannot state or imply that the product can or will control or reduce organisms that pose a threat to human health," which EPA illustrates with ticks that carry Lyme disease (EPA, conditions for minimum risk pesticides). States may also require registration. We read the list in 40 CFR 152.25: it names oils such as cedarwood, citronella, lemongrass, peppermint and rosemary, but neither coriander nor cilantro oil appears. Reasoning from that, a product with cilantro oil as its active ingredient does not fit the exemption as listed, so a shop could not simply bottle it and call it a bug spray. The practical meaning is that the "disease-carrying mosquito" claim, the one a traveller cares about, is the claim a minimum-risk product is not allowed to make. For the wider claims picture, see cosmetic versus drug claims.

What we would do

  1. Where insects carry disease (dengue, malaria, Lyme, West Nile), use an EPA-registered repellent from the CDC list and ask a physician or travel-medicine clinic about the destination. This is not a job for an oil seller.
  2. For a pleasant-smelling garden table, a cilantro leaf oil diffusion or candle is a fragrance choice. We make no repellent claim for it, and you should not count on it to keep anything off you.
  3. If you want to apply oil to skin anyway, dilute it, patch test first (see how to dilute cilantro essential oil), keep it away from eyes, and do not use it on young children without asking a pediatrician. Our oil is undiluted, so the dilution maths is yours.

Who should skip this entirely

Anyone relying on a home-made oil blend as their only protection in a malaria, dengue or tick-borne disease area; pregnant readers, who should ask an OB-GYN or midwife about any repellent; and anyone with a history of skin reactions to fragrance, who should ask a dermatologist or allergist before putting terpene-rich oils on the skin. For our safety notes, see the cilantro oil safety guide. Pets and aromatic oils are a separate question for a veterinarian.

Cilantro Essential Oil bottle

Cilantro Essential Oil

Cilantro Essential Oil from our own shop, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

From $13.99

Shop Now →

Sources & Further Reading