Does Sol de Janeiro body butter attract spiders? Experts weigh in
Arachnophobes beware: this body lotion reportedly attracts colossal eight-legged pests to your home.
Sephora customers are warning beauty lovers not to purchase the skin-quenching Sol de Janeiro Delícia Drench Body Butter, claiming that it entices scarily large arachnids that, in some cases, chase the wearer.
One spooked buyer alleges that wolf spiders — which measure half an inch to 2 inches long — “come out” immediately after applying the balm, which retails for $22-$48 online and in Sephora stores.
“Normally I’ll see one every like 3 years, used this and it was every day. I stopped using it and haven’t seen one since,” the anonymous reviewer wrote just this week, giving the product one star. “Oh and one time, the spider wanted to eat whatever ingredient it is so bad that it chased me.”
The reviewer added: “I’d run left, it ran left, I ran right, it ran right. Like it was legit following the scent. And no, the scent isn’t that good, nothing a $5 vanilla cream can’t match.”
The cautionary tale sparked a Reddit investigation into “spider science,” as one user called it.
One X user posted an image of an alleged wolf spider bite after using the body butter, while an amateur investigator on Reddit reported placing a lotion sample on a tissue and watching as it attracted eight arachnids in a day.
“My coworker has been finding random spiders roaming her desk for weeks. I asked her if she used the Sol de Janeiro body butter and she pulled it out of her desk,” one Redditor wrote.
While some beauty lovers have recoiled in disgust — even going so far as to remove the nearly-purchased products from their online shopping carts — others hypothesized pheromones are to blame.
Arachnologists are debunking those theories.
Dr. Jerome Rovner, a professor of biology at Ohio University, told The Post in an email that while “there is a remote possibility” that one of the chemicals in the Sol de Janeiro cream could be attracting wolf spiders, there is little to no evidence to support the claim.
Research analyzing the effects of pheromones on spiders is limited to those that weave webs — wolf spiders do not, explained Rovner, a current member and former president of the American Arachnological Society.
Pheromones — chemicals released to attract a mate — are “highly species-specific,” Dr. George Uetz, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati, told The Post.
Redditors claimed that the chemicals farnesyl acetate and hexadecyl acetate, which were shown to attract male web weaving spiders in one study, would have the same effect on wolf spiders.
But those chemicals are not present in the Sol de Janeiro cream, a representative from the brand told The Post, and “any claims that say otherwise are false and have no merit whatsoever.”
“Sol de Janeiro takes the safety and concerns of its consumers extremely seriously,” the company said in a statement, emphasizing their commitment to to sustainability, safety and health.
“While we cannot speak to the affect these aforementioned chemicals have on arachnids, we confidently can say that these chemicals are not present in any of our products.”
Not to mention, the research on such chemicals and their arachnid effects would not be applicable to all species.
“For, if it were so, male wolf spiders would be attracted to the webs of female web-weaving spiders, which they certainly are not,” Rovner said. “Why would a wolf spider try to mate with a web-weaver?”
Until more studies are conducted, Rovner added, “The recent few anecdotal reports should be regarded as coincidences.”
“It must be noted that wolf spiders wander into houses to seek shelter with the onset of colder weather, so seeing more of them indoors recently is to be expected,” Rovner noted.
So, before you toss out your beloved body balm, take heed from the expert spider men — and don’t believe everything you read online.
“The internet is a great source of information, but it’s not always accurate, and someone putting a dab of body butter on a tissue and reporting in Reddit that it attracts spiders doesn’t count as research,” Uetz noted.
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