Do Intimacy Gummies Actually Work for Women? What the Research on Maca and Ashwagandha Says

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Your Health Magazine Contributor

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Do Intimacy Gummies Actually Work for Women? What the Research on Maca and Ashwagandha Says

Intimacy gummies get marketed hard, and most of that marketing is pointed at men. The more interesting question is whether they do anything for women. Most of these products are built on the same two ingredients, maca and ashwagandha, so we skipped the ad copy and went to the human trials.

The maca trials came first

Maca is a root vegetable from the Peruvian Andes, grown there as food long before anyone put it in a gummy, sold ground up or as a concentrated extract. It has the longer paper trail of the two, so that’s where we started: medical databases, filtered for trials actually run in women. That filter clears out most of what gets cited in ads.

The study that survives it landed in 2008 in the journal Menopause. Researchers in Australia gave fourteen postmenopausal women 3.5 grams of powdered maca a day for six weeks and a matching placebo for another six, in random order and double blinded, so neither the women nor the scientists knew which was which until the end. Crossover setups like that earn their keep in tiny studies, since every woman serves as her own control. On maca, the women’s scores on standard measures of sexual dysfunction went down. So did their anxiety and depression scores.

The bloodwork is the strange part. The team went in specifically checking whether maca behaves like estrogen in the body. It didn’t. Estradiol, FSH, and the rest of the hormone panel stayed flat while the symptom scores moved anyway. The improvement, wherever it came from, wasn’t hormonal. The authors were careful to call the findings preliminary.

Then there’s a 2015 randomized trial with a tougher group: women whose sexual function had flattened out on antidepressants, which happens a lot. Forty-five women got maca or placebo. More of the maca group reached remission by the end, the difference was clearest in the postmenopausal women, and the root was well tolerated. Small numbers again, but the direction matched the 2008 result.

What the ashwagandha studies found

The ashwagandha research is newer and aims straighter at the question, because those trials recruited women who were unhappy with their sex lives.

A 2015 pilot published in BioMed Research International took fifty women between 21 and 50 dealing with sexual difficulties and randomized them to 300 milligrams of a concentrated root extract twice a day, or to starch capsules, for eight weeks. Progress was tracked on the Female Sexual Function Index, the standard questionnaire in this field, which scores desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and pain. The extract group came out ahead of placebo on the index, with the gains showing up in arousal, lubrication, orgasm, and satisfaction, and they logged more successful sexual encounters by the end of the eight weeks.

One detail from that pilot cuts against the way these products usually get sold. The desire scores didn’t move much. Arousal moved. Satisfaction moved. The women weren’t necessarily wanting sex more often, they were getting more out of it when it happened.

A bigger trial followed in 2022 in the journal Cureus: eighty women between 18 and 50 with low sexual desire, the same 300 milligram twice-daily dose, the same eight weeks. The ashwagandha group reported more satisfying sexual encounters than placebo at week four and again at week eight, and side effects came out about even between the two groups.

What the researchers think is going on

Neither set of researchers claims to know how any of this works. The maca authors mostly shrug. The 2008 team ruled out the obvious hormonal route and left the how of it open.

The ashwagandha authors point at stress. The root, a fixture of Ayurvedic practice for centuries, has a long record in stress and anxiety trials, and the study teams note that stress, fatigue, and low mood sit near the top of the list of things that interfere with women’s sexual function in the first place. Under that reading, the extract’s job is mostly to lower the interference. They don’t claim more than that.

Where gummies fit in

The trials used measured extracts, taken every day, for about two months. A gummy borrowing those ingredients can print anything on the front of the bag, so the back label is where you find out what you bought. The useful ones state the form and the numbers: root extract, milligrams, concentration. Plenty of supplement labels hide behind blends with no amounts, and a blend can’t be held up against any trial. A 10 to 1 extract, for the record, packs ten parts of raw root into one, so extract milligrams and raw-powder grams aren’t the same currency.

Kinky Cubes intimacy gummies for women list both maca and ashwagandha among their ingredients: maca root extract at 500 milligrams in a 10 to 1 concentration and ashwagandha root extract at 50 milligrams, also 10 to 1, alongside beetroot extract, L-citrulline malate, and mango extract. Sixteen cubes come in a bag, with the company directing users to take two cubes per person. The company also states that effects may begin around 30 minutes after use and last up to three hours; those timing claims were not established by the maca or ashwagandha trials discussed above. The warning text is blunt about who should sit this out, anyone with heart or blood pressure issues, and caps it at two cubes a day.

The arithmetic between a label like that and a trial isn’t clean. The studies used raw powder in one case and a twice-daily concentrated extract in the other, and converting between formats stacks up assumptions fast. The narrower conclusion is that the product lists maca and ashwagandha in concentrated extract form at stated amounts. The available studies do not establish that this particular formulation produces the same effects.

So do they actually work for women?

Maca and ashwagandha are the two ingredients in this category with genuine human trials behind them in women, and those trials came back positive on arousal, satisfaction, and standard measures of sexual dysfunction, small trials and all.

The research also hints at who has the most reason to be curious. One maca trial was run entirely in postmenopausal women, and the other saw its clearest benefit in them. The ashwagandha trials recruited women no older than fifty who wanted more from their sex lives, and by their own questionnaire scores they got it, more than the placebo groups did.

Whether a particular gummy produces similar effects cannot be determined from these studies alone, because formulation, dose, and ingredient preparation can differ substantially between products. The research suggests that maca and ashwagandha may affect some measures of female sexual function, but the studies are small and do not establish that intimacy gummies as a product category – or any particular gummy – will produce those results.