85% of Women Said These Gummies Boosted Their Libido (So Do They Work or Not?) - VICE

We independently evaluate all of our recommendations. When you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more here.

Dame relaunched Desire Gummies this year with a reworked formula, and led with something most libido supplements skip entirely. The relaunch came with an independent study on the finished product, not just its individual ingredients pulled from unrelated research. 

Fifty-three women, ages 24 to 52, all reporting low desire and stressful lives, took the gummies daily for four weeks. Across 24 measured outcomes, 85% reported more sexual desire, 93% reported better mood, and 87% reported less stress and anxiety.

That’s the kind of number this category almost never has. 

It’s also not the whole story, though. We chatted with Dame founder and CEO Alexandra Fine—a sexologist, and the one who signed off on this relaunch—to walk through what that study proves, what it doesn’t, and the habits she thinks shoppers should be more suspicious of across the category, including some hers leans on too.

Fine’s answer to what sets Dame apart wasn’t about a superstar hero ingredient. The proof was a lot less glamorous.

“Third-party data,” Fine said, “… which is the least sexy sentence I have ever said out loud in an interview about libido.”

The company paid Citruslabs—a lab with no stake in whether the product works—to study the finished product itself, not just its individual ingredients on their own, which is how most of this category gets to cite “clinical” support in the first place.

“Here’s the part most brands would leave out of that paragraph,” she said. “The testing was open-label, single-group with no placebo, so everybody knew what they were taking. The outcomes were self-reported on a 5-point scale.”

Ultimately, her advice for sizing up any product in the category applies just as much to her own: “Ask who ran the study, how many people, how long, and whether there was a control group. Most of this category can’t answer the first one.”

Asked what bugs her most about competitors—the “BS,” as I framed it—Fine didn’t point to outright lying. “I don’t see many outright lies,” she said. “I see omissions, which are quieter and work better.”

Two habits stand out to her. The first is flattening who a product is actually for: “Not everybody needs hormone replacement therapy. Not everybody needs L-theanine. Flatten that in an ad and you move more units and you make somebody feel like they need something they might not.” 

The second is dosing. “Studies get run at a specific amount of an ingredient,” she said. “I have seen plenty of labels carrying a fraction of that amount, across a long list of ingredients, sprinkled, while they keep the claims from the original studies. Fairy dusting.”

She was careful to add nuance before letting that land as a blanket accusation. “’BS’ is a strong word and I want to be careful with it, because this isn’t binary. 4 grams working and 3 grams doing nothing is not how bodies do math. It’s a continuum. But dosages are real, and a lot of this category is betting you won’t check.”

That matters more with adaptogens specifically, because they take weeks to do anything. 

“If the dose is wrong, you don’t find out fast,” Fine said. “You just decide it didn’t work for you and blame yourself, which is a hell of a business model if you’re the one selling it.”

Desire Gummies’ ingredient list—Sensoril ashwagandha, L-theanine, mucuna standardized to L-DOPA, shatavari, and rhodiola—is dosed against the finished-product study versus borrowed from unrelated research, according to Fine, who drew a line I’d have otherwise blurred. 

“What we have is an independent study on the finished product, run by Citruslabs. That is not the same thing as a potency-and-contaminant panel, and if a brand says third-party tested without telling you which one they mean, ask.”

“Agreed, and I sell the gummy,” Fine said, when I asked how much of this is really about more partner support than a supplement. Her actual recommendation was something that many of us tend to avoid or gloss over entirely.

“Work out how your partner is affecting your desire, and then say it out loud to them. Most people know something is off and never name the mechanism.”

If the issue is stress-based, which she said it usually is, the real question is what you need. “Do you need your partner carrying more of the mental load? Or do you need them to back off for a while? Those are opposite tasks and people mix them up constantly.”

She also pointed out that the answer can change. “What you needed from your partner two years ago and what you need now, post-baby or post-job-change or post-anything, is usually not the same thing, and nobody sends out an update.”

Look, I know I’m not the target audience. I’m a guy. But… I ate one. I’m a sucker for gummies.

Dame’s own FAQ describes the flavor as mango and strawberry “with an earthy undertone.” And that’s wildly accurate. It’s also about as far as I can responsibly review it. 

I’m not in the population this was formulated for or tested on. Dame is clear that the formula isn’t mechanistically gendered, though nothing in ashwagandha or L-theanine only works on women. The clinical trial itself, though, was cis women only, and Fine was specific about one subgroup she wanted represented within that.

“We intentionally included perimenopausal women in our study, since it’s a key group for the product,” she said. “A lot of perimenopause symptoms include stress, sleep, mood components, and plenty of them have a sexual component.”

That’s not the same as treating perimenopause directly, and Fine didn’t pitch it that way. 

“Desire was built for stress, anxiety and dopamine, bringing cortisol down, and dopamine up. That’s the target we formulated against,” she said. 

The overlap with perimenopause is about symptom support, not hormones. 

“Ingredients like ashwagandha and L-theanine support a wide range of symptoms sitting under a wide range of diagnoses.” True to the rest of this conversation, she didn’t let that sit as a bigger claim than it is, saying, “You can also go buy either one on its own, by the way. I’m not going to pretend you can’t.”

Desire Gummies are a reasonable pick for someone dealing with stress-linked low desire who wants a brand that’ll explain its methodology instead of hiding behind “clinically proven.” They’re not a guarantee, of course, and there’s no placebo-controlled data yet. 

On timeline, “Four weeks is the number I can stand behind,” Fine said. So, go in with that in mind before deciding if they’re doing anything for you or not. For what it’s worth, though, what makes this relaunch worth a look (and ultimately a 4-week try) isn’t a new ingredient. It’s a founder willing to hand you the questions that could talk her out of a sale. With so much concern about transparency these days, or lack thereof… that’s a pretty big deal.