Vosshall reassures me that it’s true, mosquitoes really do find some people more attractive than others. A lot of people doubted that this was the case, she says, despite the plethora of anecdotal evidence. Skeptics thought that everyone gets bitten about the same, but people whose immune systems react more strongly to the mosquito’s anticoagulant simply notice bites more. Vosshall designed her pilot study to weed out this variable. Volunteers exposed a patch of their forearm and a machine blew air across it, enticing mosquitoes into a trap. She found that mosquitoes found some people’s body odor four times as appetizing as others.
She also found that those people don’t really know whether they’re mosquito super attractors or not. In an attempt to get a diverse sample for her study, she designed a questionnaire asking people whether mosquitoes sought them out or ignored them. “We found zero correlation,” she says. What she concluded is that mosquito attractiveness is all relative. You could be a 40, she says, on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 100, but everyone else in your family is a 10, so mosquitoes go to you. But if you start hanging out with a bunch of 80s, you’ll be safe. “It could be a Craigslist thing,” she says. “Hey, we’re having a picnic, we’ll pay you $100 to come attract all the mosquitoes.”