Flo VitaminsFlo PMS Gummiesreview

Flo Vitamins with a miraculous donut-shaped gummy vitamin to the PMS rescue?

Anyone else feel like the week leading up to their period is more challenging than their actual time of the month? 🙋🏻‍♀️  (And while we’re at it – let’s normalize talking about periods!)

We are so grateful to Flo Vitamins for this thoughtful creation, which has taken the entire spectrum of symptoms of PMS into consideration, and which has received rave reviews across the internet.

But how do these work? Magic, right? That’s what PMS-curing gummies sound like to us.

But, as usual, it’s the wonder of plants to the rescue. Nature (disguised as the prettiest pink gummy) is here to make it better.

So first, let’s talk about those leafy ingredients and break it all down:

👉 or jump to did they work for us?

What’s in Flo Vitamins?

Chasteberry

Fun fact: The name “chaste berry” purportedly originates from the Middle Ages when monks believed that this berry would curb sex drive. (Turns out, PMS does that on its own 😹). But Chasteberry (aka Vitex Agnus-Castus if you’re feeling fancy) has been used since at least ancient Greek times to address PMS symptoms like hormonal acne, mood issues, and breast pain.

There have been quite a few clinical studies on the effects of Chasteberry on PMS, and most of them have shown significant reduction in symptoms.¹

While the studies looked at a whole range of self-reported symptoms, including irritability, mood alteration, anger, headache, breast fullness, and other menstrual symptoms including bloating,² Chasteberry has also been studied specifically for its effect on period-related breast pain, aka cyclical mastalgia.

A 2007 meta-study concluded that

There is convincing laboratory-based and clinical evidence available that A. castus is safe, effective and efficient in the treatment of cyclical mastalgia. It has a safe side effect profile and can be used safely for the treatment of cyclical mastalgia.³

So Chasteberry is a pretty promising herbal addition to your PMS arsenal!

Chasteberry Dosage

It does seem like the effects of Chasteberry extract are dosage-dependent⁴, but because Flo uses a proprietary herbal blend, we can’t tell exactly how much extract is in these gummies.

So it’s hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison, but where the Flo Vitamins gummies contain a total of 110 mg of their proprietary blend per serving, HUM’s Moody Bird has 300 mg of Chasteberry Extract per serving.

Even if Flo’s entire blend was made up of Chasteberry, the Moody Bird would still have almost 3 times as much per serving!

Ok! What else?

Vitamin B6

Vitamin B6 is also included in the Flo gummies, and we are continually in awe of what the spectrum of B vitamins can do for us.

Studies show that people who take B6 are less prone to irritability, and have demonstrated notable alleviation of the moodier side of PMS.⁵

While the study we referenced used 50mg of B6 per day, the Flo gummies have 20mg of B6 per serving. That’s still more than enough to cover your RDA of B6, though, which is always a good idea.

Lemon Balm

Next up, let’s welcome Lemon Balm to this harmonious symphony of herbal goodness. Lemon Balm is a well-known remedy for calming the body and improving those all-over-the-place emotions.

One study has looked at the efficacy of Lemon Balm for alleviating PMS symptoms, and found it to be effective at reducing both physical and mood-related issues.⁶

If you’re curious about working with Lemon Balm as a natural remedy for stress and mood fluctuations, we can’t recommend Goodbye Stress enough!  Or, if you want some CBD served up with your Lemon Balm, check out (our favorite) Charlotte’s Web CBD Calm Gummies.

Just doing our part in spreading the good news about Lemon Balm!

Dong Quai

And last but not least, Dong Quai, a storied cramp-killer. It’s called the “Female Ginseng”, which makes us wonder: is regular Ginseng male?

Either way, Dong Quai has been used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine for a host of menstrual-related symptoms, running the gamut from supposedly balancing estrogen levels to alleviating cramping.

Plus, Flo gummies are made with pectin, so they’re vegan! They’re also gluten free, non-GMO and the bottle is BPA-free.

Worth Noting:

Here’s some fine print we found interesting: for maximum efficacy, Flo gummies are not designed to be popped just when you’re feeling all those feelings.  So how long does it take for Flo vitamins to work?

In order to see results, you need to take 2 gummies daily for at least a month. Beyond that, Flo recommends giving it two menstrual cycles in order to get the full effects. A lot of the studies we referenced above lasted about 3 months.

Luckily, taking two gummies a day isn’t the worst trade-off if it means saying goodbye to those often genuinely agonizing PMS moments. In fact, we’ll eat gummies for way less!

And now for the question we’ve all been waiting for:

Do Flo Gummies Work?

If you’ve done any amount of sleuthing, you already know that the internet is abuzz with every miraculous claim for these gummies, from healed acne to easy two-day periods. But is it too good to be true?

Our hot take: yes and no.

Here’s what we can report back:

Mood

We indeed noticed a drastic improvement with overall mood, and kind of didn’t even notice our period coming at all! That’s pretty effective gummy magic right there, since normally we can sense our period coming a mile away.

The day before we start our periods we always deal with some real deep mood swings 🥴. It’s like clockwork. A real dark, existential clock.

But that didn’t happen when we took these, which is actually incredible. This alone is worth the price of admission, for us at least.

Physical PMS Symptoms

As for the physical symptoms in particular, we had almost zero breast tenderness, which is also pretty incredible, as we normally have super sensitive breasts around that time. Usually for at least a week before.

You know the kind of sore: when even rushing down stairs can trigger some way-too-intense painful jostling.

Flo gummies didn’t help so much with our actual period cramps once our period started (which can be pretty debilitating).  These are Premenstrual Syndrome gummies, not Menstrual Syndrome gummies, so maybe we’ll chalk it up to that and give ’em a pass?

But we know a lot of people are looking for help with cramps, so if cramps are your main issue, we can’t necessarily say these are effective in that regard.

👉 As an aside, these bath bombs from Highline Wellness can be miracle workers in this department, if you need a little extra self-care some days.

Also, we just kind of stumbled on this, but we took some of Olly’s new Hello Happy gummies on our period recently, and were kind of astonished that they helped significantly with cramps. Turns out, saffron, the main ingredient in the Hello Happies, has been clinically studied for its reduction of PMS symptoms.  We recommend giving these a try!

Flo Vitamins and Acne

Here’s our deal with the acne part of things: we’ll admit that we don’t get the worst monthly hormonal acne, though we are definitely familiar with that one deep underground zit that arrives like a harbinger to let us know the flow is on the way.

Ultimately, we can’t say that the Flo gummies helped one way or the other with acne. We didn’t notice much of a change.

This could be partially due to the fact that we’re taking a fair amount of Vitamin D3 these days, which is a hormone and when taken in large doses is known to cause acne, which we have definitely experienced with the D.

So our jury is still out on acne. Let us know if you have more definitive experiences, we’d love to hear from you!

Tasting Notes

🤤

We know that this isn’t the most important aspect of things, but these are incredibly delicious.

Flo Vitamins taste like a molasses donut. There’s something rich and decadent about this flavor that we are still wrapping our minds and tongues around. Honestly, there’s some flavor sorcery at play here that definitely helps with the monthly sweet tooth.

These are like dessert.

When all is said & done

Flo gummies are legit. We definitely noticed some pretty profound effects, at least when it comes to mood and breast pain.

We love that Flo Vitamins was founded by a brother and sister (!). A cute backstory and a small business with a female empowerment message gets us every time.

But as mentioned above, here’s the downside: you need to take two of these every single day of the month (and keep taking them) to have maximum effectiveness. That’s kind of a steep financial commitment over the long haul.

In summation, we really love Flo gummies, but aren’t sure we want to be tethered to a subscription, taking them every single day until menopause.

But the effects are real, so at the end of the day, it’s up to you and how willing your wallet is to chip in to your monthly moon cycle trials, and how severe those moon cycle trials are.

Our recommendation: they’re worth trying at least one round of, although now that we’ve tried both Flo & Moody Bird, we recommend the Moody Bird.

Godspeed and let us know how they worked for you!