Rovince Anti-Tick Clothing – FAQs
How can Rovince clothing be anti-tick?
The clothing is treated with permethrin. The fabric is treated before the clothing is manufactured which ensures that it is evenly distributed throughout the garment.
Permethrin creates a “hot feet effect”, which ensures that when a tick comes into contact with the clothing it becomes paralyzed almost immediately and falls.
How long will the permethrin treatment remain effective?
The permethrin treatment will wash out gradually over time, but generally it should remain effective for at least 80 washes, so in practice it will probably last the lifetime of the garment. Socks are usually good for about 60 washes because of the more open weave of the fabric and the heavier wear.
What’s special about how the treatment is applied to Rovince clothing?
Rovince don’t use a monomer application of permethrin in the production of their clothing. While a monomer application ensures wash resistance, it also prevents a constant availability of the active ingredient permethrin on the surface of the coating.
Monomer applications will indicate the correct amount of permethrin but lack the necessary bioavailability – the permethrin becomes encapsulated, so that insects are hardly influenced by it and garments coated in this way have little or no effect on ticks.
With Rovince clothing, the active substance permethrin is bound in a co-polymer (mainly acrylate and silicone elastomers (polysiloxanes)). This combination ensures a perfect balance between durability (wash resistance) and bioactivity (the silicone elastomers allow the permethrin to diffuse out gradually and sustainably).
How much permethrin is in Rovince clothing?
After extensive testing in the 1980s, the US Army established 1250 mg/m2 as the ideal amount of permethrin – sufficient to keep the insects away, yet not so high as to cause problems for the wearer. The lower value of 200 mg was also established – once this level is reached, the garment needs to be replaced. Rovince works within these universally accepted standards.
What insects does Rovince provide protection from?
Permethrin it is a contact insecticide, so it will only work if there is effective direct contact between the insect and the permethrin for a certain period of time. The smaller the insect, the larger the relative contact surface between the insect and the active substance permethrin, and hence the greater the effect of the clothing.
In practice, this means the clothing performs well with small insects – ticks, fleas, lice, midges, mosquitoes, sand flies and ants – and less well or not at all with larger insects such as bees. This is because of the much smaller contact area relative to the size of the bee, whereas a tick, on the other hand, has a much larger relative contact area and hence the effect of the permethrin is almost instant.
Will sunlight degrade the effectiveness of Rovince clothing?
No negative influences of UV irradiation have been measured and/or determined which would reduce the efficiency of the Rovince clothing.
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