Why Chamomile Oil Is Not for Swallowing
No, chamomile essential oil is not for swallowing, ours or anyone else's. The advice you may have seen about taking it by mouth usually leans on one true fact, that chamomile tea is one of the most familiar drinks in the world, and stretches it to a concentrated oil. The two are a long way apart, and a little arithmetic shows how far.
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The European Medicines Agency's draft assessment of German chamomile gives three useful numbers. The dried flowers hold 0.3% to 1.9% essential oil, with a pharmacopoeia minimum yield of 0.4%, and tea brewed from the flowers carries only 10% to 15% of the oil available in the flower (EMA/HMPC/55837/2011, draft).
Take one gram of dried flowers. At the 0.4% minimum that is about 4 mg of oil in the flower, and only 0.4 to 0.6 mg of it reaches the cup. At the 1.9% top end it is about 19 mg, with roughly 2 to 3 mg in the cup. Now the bottle: a drop is around one-twentieth of a milliliter, and at a density near 0.9 g/ml (the Certificate of Analysis we publish for one German batch lists 0.913) that is roughly 45 mg. By this reasoning, a single drop holds about as much oil as the tea from 15 to 110 grams of flowers, with nothing diluting it. A 0.5 oz bottle holds hundreds of drops.
That is our arithmetic from a regulator's figures, not a measured toxic dose, and it ignores everything else a cup of tea contains. What it shows is why the comfortable safety record of a drink says very little about a dropper bottle.
What "generally recognized as safe" does and does not mean
People often point to the US food rules as proof that chamomile is fine to eat. The rules do list it: 21 CFR 182.10 names camomile, English or Roman (Anthemis nobilis) and German or Hungarian (Matricaria chamomilla) among spices and natural seasonings, and 182.20 lists chamomile flowers, Hungarian and Roman or English, among essential oils and natural extractives (eCFR, 21 CFR Part 182). But the listing is for use "for their intended use", which means flavoring food at the trace amounts a flavorist adds. It does not describe a consumer bottle of oil, and it sets no amount for swallowing a concentrate.
But is it taken by mouth somewhere?
The same EMA draft covers traditional herbal medicines, and its oral preparations are teas and liquid extracts. The one place the essential oil itself appears is bathing: bath additives containing chamomile oil have been marketed in Germany since 1976, at 125 to 500 mg of oil per 100 g of additive. That is a very different thing from a drink.
There are other reasons for caution, offered as reasoning from the sources. Chamomile is a daisy-family plant, and anyone sensitive to that family can react. And in a laboratory study using isolated human enzymes, German chamomile essential oil inhibited several cytochrome P450 enzymes, most strongly CYP1A2 (summarised in the EMA draft, from Ganzera et al., 2006). That was not a human trial, but it is the sort of thing a pharmacist would want to know about before concentrated oil meets a regular medicine. Our side effects and interactions article goes further.
If a bottle has been swallowed
Call Poison Control in the US at 1-800-222-1222, which is free, confidential and open around the clock, or use the online tool at poison.org. Poison Control notes that harm can follow if someone tries to swallow an essential oil, chokes, and some of it enters the lungs (Poison Control). Tisserand's page for neat Roman chamomile carries the same hazard wording (Tisserand). If the person is unconscious, seizing or not breathing, call 911 instead.
What we sell the oil for
Our chamomile oils are for aroma and for diluted skin use, at the 0.5% to 2% in a carrier oil that we recommend, with a patch test first. Our guides to dilution and safety cover how, and for a question about taking anything by mouth, a pharmacist or physician is the right person to ask.
Keep the bottle capped and up high, and let the tea be the thing you drink.
Roman Chamomile Essential Oil
Roman Chamomile Essential Oil from our own shop, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.
From $32.99
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