The Canadian army is now using a product called Ultrathon made by 3M. I still have a few tubes at home from my last deployment but this stuff is also available in stores. It's very efficient as it contains 34% Deet.
Have some Ultrathon I picked up in the US. It is deet, but it's in a controlled release form so lasts a very long time..
When looking at various brands, the are ALL THE SAME, the only difference is the percentage of DEET, nothing else matters (except for Ultrathon which is time release). Go for whichever has the highest percentage.
Also what works extremely well is treating your cloths with Permethrin. It is a permanent insecticide that is still effective through about 10 washings. However, not available in Canada..... but everywhere in the US.
Haven't done it yet, but going to try diluting concentrated permethrin insecticide down to the same 0.5 to 0.7% of the commercial clothing products, and soaking some cloths in it. Also works well to treat socks and spray it on shoes. It keeps ticks from climbing up socks and pants.
I used permethrin treated cloths and Ultrathon recently when in Africa in a malaria area. They had several very nasty strains of malaria in the area, which hospitalized several expats, and even killed one in a couple days.
How much percentage of deet as an ingredient is there actually in DEET?
DEET
is the active ingredient, it is an abbreviation of the chemical name: N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide.
Same as in a previous post, we also still have some lotion (it's a yellowish oily substance) that's 95% or 98% DEET. Current maximum percentage of DEET in products is limited to around 30% to 34%.