Chamomile

The dried flower head of German chamomile, the small white-and-yellow daisy that has been drunk as a bedtime tea for centuries. In skincare it is the same plant, included as a botanical extract rather than for anything you drink.

The named active is apigenin, a flavonoid that binds the central benzodiazepine site — the 1995 work that isolated it from chamomile flowers measured a Ki of 4 micromolar against flunitrazepam. Same site as a class of sedative drugs. What apigenin does once it is bound is genuinely disputed: some work reports positive modulation, other work reports the opposite, and in the original mouse experiments it was anxiolytic without sedation or muscle relaxation at benzodiazepine-comparable doses. Then there is delivery. In chamomile the apigenin is present mostly as apigenin-7-O-glucoside. Gut enzymes have to cleave the sugar off before anything is absorbed, and the free apigenin that results is then heavily glucuronidated and sulfated in the intestinal wall and liver. So the receptor story is real and the quantity arriving at the receptor is small. Topically the relevant molecules are different ones: alpha-bisabolol, a major constituent of the flower's essential oil, and chamazulene, which is not in the fresh flower at all but forms from matricin when the oil is distilled. Both have been studied as anti-irritants in cell and animal models rather than in good human trials.

Used to support the wind-down and studied for normal sleep quality. Topically in FADE it is one of the botanical extracts in the sensitive-skin formula, there for the flower's long-standing soothing use on skin that looks irritated.

People building a real evening routine who want the oldest bedtime herb in the cupboard included, and anyone whose skin prefers a soothing botanical in a topical. Explicitly not for anyone allergic to ragweed or other Asteraceae plants, not for anyone on warfarin or another anticoagulant without medical advice — including the topical — and not for use in pregnancy or breastfeeding, given how thin the safety data is.

Oral: in the evening with the rest of the wind-down. One SLEEP strip, or OUT as labelled, roughly 30 to 60 minutes before bed. Do not assume that adding several mugs of chamomile tea on top is neutral if you are on an anticoagulant. Topical: apply FADE to clean skin as directed, and patch test on the inner forearm first if you have any history of Asteraceae allergy. We publish every amount in the oral products. We cannot publish the chamomile percentage in FADE, because the manufacturer does not disclose percentages for any ingredient in it, and we would rather say so than imply a number we do not have.

At 10 mg, nothing you will notice. At 100 mg, nothing you can separate from the valerian, lemon balm and passion flower next to it. In the trials, at four to eleven times the amount in OUT and forty to a hundred and ten times the amount in SLEEP, the effect was a modest lift in rated sleep quality over four weeks — pooled across trials, under two points on a questionnaire that runs to 21. In the same pooled analysis, how long people slept did not change, sleep efficiency did not change, and daytime functioning did not change. Topically, a sense of comfort rather than a visible change.

Adib-Hajbaghery and Mousavi (2017, Complementary Therapies in Medicine) gave 60 nursing-home residents aged 60 and over 200 mg of chamomile extract twice daily for 28 days against a wheat-flour capsule, and found significantly better Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index scores (p<0.05). It was single-blind, which is a real limitation. Zick and colleagues (2011, BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine) gave 34 adults with DSM-IV chronic primary insomnia 270 mg twice daily for 28 days and found no significant difference from placebo on any sleep-diary measure; effect sizes for sleep latency and night-time awakenings were moderate but did not reach significance. Amsterdam and colleagues (2009, Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology) randomised 57 people with mild-to-moderate generalised anxiety disorder to 220 mg capsules standardised to 1.2% apigenin, titrated up to five capsules a day over eight weeks, and reported a greater reduction in Hamilton Anxiety score than placebo at p=0.047. Kazemi and colleagues (2024, Complementary Therapies in Medicine) reviewed ten studies and 772 participants and pooled five of them for sleep quality: PSQI fell by 1.88 points (95% CI 0.31 to 3.46), with heterogeneity of 88.4%, which is high enough to treat the pooled figure as an estimate rather than a result. The same review found no improvement in sleep duration, sleep efficiency or daytime functioning, and noted that only one of the ten studies checked whether its blinding had worked or tested the purity of the product it used. Hieu and colleagues (2019, Phytotherapy Research) pooled 12 randomised and quasi-randomised trials: sleep quality improved (SMD -0.73, 95% CI -1.23 to -0.23), generalised anxiety improved on the Hamilton scale at two and four weeks, but pooled anxiety across three trials showed no difference at all (SMD -0.15, 95% CI -0.46 to 0.16, p=0.42), and the single trial measuring insomnia severity found no change. Topically, Patzelt-Wenczler and Ponce-Poschl (2000, European Journal of Medical Research) ran a partially double-blind half-side comparison of a branded chamomile flower extract cream against 0.5% hydrocortisone and the vehicle cream in people with moderate atopic eczema, and after two weeks reported mild superiority over the hydrocortisone but only a marginal difference from the vehicle — a considerably weaker result than it is usually quoted as, on a different product at an undisclosed concentration, and it says nothing about FADE. We make no claim from any of this. MASC / BODY does not offer chamomile as a treatment for insomnia, for an anxiety disorder or for any skin condition. Nothing has been tested at 10 mg or at 100 mg.