Chamomile Aroma and Stress: What Trials Found

Chamomile and stress go together in people's minds almost automatically. When you look at the research, though, two different things are hiding under that one idea: swallowed chamomile extract in capsules, and chamomile aroma that people simply breathe in. Only the second has anything to do with a bottle of essential oil, so it is the one worth looking at.

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil bottle

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil

Our own Roman Chamomile Essential Oil, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

From $32.99

Shop Now →

Extract trials are a different thing

The best-known chamomile trial for anxiety, by Amsterdam and colleagues in 2009, gave 57 outpatients with mild to moderate generalized anxiety disorder either oral Matricaria recutita extract or placebo for 8 weeks. The chamomile group had a bigger drop on a clinician-rated anxiety scale. That is a capsule, taken by mouth, in people under clinical supervision. It says nothing about what a scent does, and our essential oils are not for swallowing.

What the aroma trials looked at

The inhaled-oil trials are mostly small hospital studies. Three give a fair picture.

The pattern across them is consistent: people who smelled an aroma reported lower scores than people who smelled nothing. That fits an effect of the oil, and it fits expectation too, because scent is very hard to blind. Even the sesame-oil placebo smells like something, and plain water does not smell like anything. So a careful reading is that, in these settings, a familiar aroma was linked to lower self-rated anxiety, which is a smaller claim than "the oil lowers anxiety".

The doses are all over the map

Different trials used wildly different amounts, so here is the simple arithmetic at roughly 20 drops per ml (dropper-dependent, so approximate). Three drops of a 1.5% solution is about 0.15 ml of liquid with roughly 0.002 ml of oil, around a tenth of a neat drop. Seven drops of 10% works out to about 0.7 of a neat drop. Nine drops of 40% across three hours comes to nearly four neat drops. That is close to a 40-fold spread, with different carriers and delivery methods, and it is one more reason not to treat any trial's figure as a recommended amount. They are inhalation figures and say nothing about skin dilution, where our guidance is 0.5% to 2% in a carrier.

Where we land

Anxiety is a medical matter. If worry is getting in the way of work, sleep or relationships, or has lasted weeks, a doctor or mental health professional is the right person to talk to, and a bottle of oil is no substitute. If you are in crisis in the United States, you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

What we can offer is the scent. Both our oils are sold undiluted for aroma and cosmetic use, our Roman oil is sweet, apple-like and herbaceous, and our German oil is sweet and herbaceous with a hay-like softness. Skip chamomile if you react to ragweed, daisies or related plants (NCCIH), keep it away from children and pets, and never swallow it. Our benefits evidence map shows where these trials sit among the others, the evening routine post covers using the aroma as a habit, and lavender with chamomile covers the pairing.

If what you want is the smell of chamomile as part of your evening, that is something either of our oils can give you, and that is as far as we go.

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil bottle

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil

Roman Chamomile Essential Oil from our own shop, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

From $32.99

Shop Now →

Sources & Further Reading