Ticks are a common hazard in outdoor environments, especially in wooded and grassy areas, where they wait on vegetation to attach to a passing host. These tiny arachnids do not fly or jump, but instead crawl, making the clothing you wear your first and most effective defense against bites and the transmission of tick-borne illnesses. Simple adjustments to your outdoor attire can create a physical barrier and help you spot and remove ticks before they find a place to feed. By combining strategic dressing with specialized treatments and proper post-activity care, you can significantly reduce your risk of a tick encounter.
Creating Physical Barriers
The primary goal of dressing for tick prevention is to eliminate any openings that allow ticks to reach your skin easily. Wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants is the first step toward achieving full coverage, ensuring minimal skin is exposed. Ticks have an instinct to crawl upward once they board a host, so sealing the gaps in your clothing forces them to travel along the outside of the fabric where they are more likely to be detected.
The most effective technique is the “tuck,” which involves tucking your pant legs securely into your socks or boots. This creates a continuous barrier at ground level, which is where ticks most often latch on, particularly the nymphal stage ticks. Similarly, tucking your shirt into your pants prevents ticks that climb up the outside of your trousers from gaining access to your torso or waistline. This simple act turns your clothing into a continuous external path for the tick, giving you more time to find it.
Strategic Clothing Attributes
Beyond simply covering your skin, the properties of the clothing itself can aid in tick avoidance and detection.
Color
Choosing clothing in light colors, such as white, tan, or light gray, is recommended because it maximizes the visibility of dark-colored ticks. Since most ticks are dark brown, red, or black, the contrast against a lighter background makes them easier to spot during quick checks in the field.
Fabric
Fabric choice is also a factor, as tightly woven, smooth materials make it more difficult for ticks to grab hold and climb. Synthetic or technical fabrics like nylon and polyester often possess a tighter weave than natural fibers like cotton, offering a smoother surface that ticks struggle to traverse.
Treating Apparel with Repellents
For a powerful second layer of defense, clothing can be treated with permethrin, a synthetic insecticide and acaricide that kills or incapacitates ticks on contact. Permethrin works by disrupting the tick’s nervous system, causing a “hot-foot” effect that makes them quickly fall off the treated fabric. This treatment significantly reduces the likelihood of a bite, with studies showing that treated clothing can make an individual up to 3.36 times less likely to receive a tick bite compared to wearing untreated garments.
Permethrin is strictly for use on clothing and gear and should never be applied directly to the skin. You can purchase clothing that is pre-treated, or you can apply a 0.5% permethrin spray yourself to items like pants, socks, and shoes. Application must be done outdoors in a well-ventilated area, and the clothing must be allowed to dry completely before being worn. When properly applied, the chemical binds tightly to the fabric fibers, offering long-lasting protection with minimal risk of skin absorption.
Post-Activity Clothing Management
Once you return indoors, immediate and proper handling of your clothing is necessary to ensure no ticks are brought into your home environment. Ticks can survive a cold or warm wash cycle, so for this reason, clothing worn in tick habitats should be removed and placed directly into a dryer.
The intense heat and dry environment of a residential dryer is highly effective at killing ticks. Research has shown that placing dry clothes directly into a dryer and tumbling them on a high heat setting for a minimum of six minutes will kill all nymphal and adult blacklegged ticks. If the clothes are wet or need to be washed first, using water that reaches a temperature of at least 130°F (54°C) is necessary to kill all ticks, followed by a full drying cycle.