Hims Hard Mints Review

With erectile dysfunction (ED) plaguing up to a full third of all men in the U.S., it’s no wonder there are so many online options for men to get reliable ED medications from reputable providers.1 You can have a consultation, get a prescription, and even have the pills shipped straight to your door all from a single website. If that wasn’t convenient enough, some companies have gone a step further, developing specialized compounded ED drugs in chewable tablets that you don’t even need water to take.

Hims is one such company, and after years of offering some of the best prices on various ED prescriptions, it has developed a chewable mint that can deliver three potent ED medications on their own or in a combination.

In this review, we discuss the benefits and potential drawbacks of Hims Hard Mints so you can determine whether these convenient, mint-flavored tablets can improve your sex life.

You and your consulting physician can customize a Hims Hard Mints order to contain sildenafil (generic for Viagra), tadalafil (generic for Cialis), vardenafil (generic for Levitra), or a combination of sildenafil and tadalafil. The convenience factor raises prices over simple pills, and doses are generally on the strong side, so the mints may not be the best place to start for men new to ED treatment. But for those who’ve had success with similar doses or whose doctors give them the green light to start here, Hard Mints could easily become a convenient solution for a struggling sex life.

At Innerbody, we thoroughly scrutinize every product and service that we review, including Hard Mints and other ED offerings from Hims and its competitors. All told, we’ve spent more than 2,000 hours covering prescription products in the ED space, poring over hundreds of scientific journal articles related to erectile health and the various drugs intended to treat it.

For this review, our team leveraged years of experience in the arena and ordered Hims Hard Mints for ourselves. That allows us to speak to specific nuances of the customer experience, from dealing with the company directly to the taste of the mints themselves.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

We selected five criteria by which we could characterize Hims Hard Mints against the backdrop of the ED treatment space as a whole. These criteria can serve as guideposts for you as you determine whether these mints are the right choice for your ED journey.

Specifically, we looked at:

• Effectiveness
• Safety
• Cost
• Convenience
• Taste

Here’s how Hims Hard Mints performed in each category:

Effectiveness

Hims Hard Mints can contain one or two out of three prominent PDE5 inhibitors to treat erectile dysfunction: sildenafil, tadalafil, and vardenafil. All three have been effective in research, but each has a relatively broad available dose range that ensures a patient can get up to a level that works without taking more than is necessary.

Sildenafil is typically available between 20mg and 100mg, tadalafil between 2.5mg and 20mg, and vardenafil between 5mg and 20mg. Treatments often start in the middle of those ranges, with research supporting starting doses of 50mg for sildenafil and 10mg for vardenafil.2 3 For tadalafil, starting doses depend on whether you want to take it as needed (the way sildenafil and vardenafil are taken) or on a daily basis. As-needed doses start around 10mg, while daily doses start around 2.5mg.4

Hims Hard Mints don’t offer the same degree of dose flexibility you see with competitive chewables or traditional ED pills, but their doses and potential combination plant them in a strong position for men new to ED treatment. Here’s a quick breakdown of available doses:

As you can see, these doses all hover around ideal starting points for new patients, with the one exception being that a dose lower than 8.5mg isn’t available for daily tadalafil. Hims still offers these as a daily prescription, but your doctor may advise that you break them in half to start before escalating to the full 8.5mg dose.

The good news is that ED medications often exhibit a positive dose-dependent relationship to their intended effects.2 That means stronger doses tend to yield better results for the men who need them.

By comparison, Ro Sparks are a bit stronger, despite only offering one completely inflexible dose of 50mg sildenafil and 22mg tadalafil. BlueChew, on the other hand, is a bit weaker in its individual doses, matching Hims’ 45mg for sildenafil, but only providing 9mg for tadalafil. That said, BlueChew’s recently introduced Max Combo puts together 18mg of tadalafil with either 45mg of sildenafil or 14mg of vardenafil. Both of those combinations are stronger than what you can get from Hims Hard Mints.

Safety

The rating we arrived at here for safety combines the well-established side effect profiles of these three drugs with a comparison of available doses in similar chewables from competitors.5

On the safety research side, PDE5 inhibitors have been known to cause various side effects, including muscle pain, decreased blood pressure, vision changes, and even nasal congestion.6 Many of these side effects arise from the collateral inhibition of phosphodiesterase enzymes other than PDE5. Research indicates that inhibition of PDE6, for example, can cause “functional blindness, blue (cynopsia) and blurred vision, and enhanced light sensitivity … upon intake of PDE5 inhibitors in patients with ED.”7

Specifically, PDE6 inhibition is more associated with sildenafil, while inhibition of PDE11, which can cause muscle pain and may affect sperm quality, is associated with tadalafil.8 9

Because these individual drugs have slightly different side effect profiles, it’s helpful that Hims offers them individually as well as in combination with one another, so you and your consulting physician can balance efficacy and safety.

Some competitors offer similar flexibility at lower doses. BlueChew is a good example of a company with a similar product that trades in slightly weaker standalone doses. However, BlueChew recently added a combination treatment to its catalog that includes tadalafil alongside either sildenafil or vardenafil at doses higher than those offered by Hims. That might make Hims a slightly safer option for men concerned with side effects who don’t want to deal with breaking up pills.

One minor knock on Hard Mints’ safety is just how much these tablets resemble commercially available mints. Even the tin makes them seem like an upscale breath freshener you might get from a specialty company or in the checkout line at Whole Foods. That increases the odds that someone who can’t safely take such a medication might discover a carelessly placed tin and take a mint without asking about it first. That could put people with certain cardiovascular conditions at risk.21

Cost

The major component of Hims’ favorable cost rating comes from its price on daily use of tadalafil and vardenafil. This is especially true when you consider that its daily doses of either medication could also be effective when taken as needed. If your doctor prescribes the daily form of either, you could conceivably receive an order, pause your subscription, take it as needed, and resume your subscription whenever you’re close to running out.

Taking advantage of that loophole can get you as-needed chewable tadalafil or vardenafil mints at 11.2mg for as little as $1.30 per dose. That's nearly $2 less per dose than BlueChew's 6mg tadalafil chews.

Here’s how Hims Hard Mints compare to competitors’ prices, with large quantities per month typically relating to lower costs per dose and higher costs per month:

As you can see, the range of potential costs per month is pretty similar from company to company, but Hims hits a sweet spot with its available doses per month, whereas companies like BlueChew either have confusing pill counts or rigid dose requirements.

That said, BlueChew has one area in which it beats out everybody else, including Hims, and that’s its recently introduced Max Combo. For as little as $4.58/dose, you can get 18mg of tadalafil blended with either 45mg of sildenafil or 14mg of vardenafil. That’s more flexible and only slightly less potent than Ro Sparks, which sell for $12/dose. The closest Hims can get to that per-dose price is $6 for its combination Hard Mint.

Convenience

It’s hard to overstate the added convenience that a chewable mint offers to the ED treatment space. Instead of carrying around a bottle of pills or needing either to find a glass of water to take a pill or to take that pill with nothing, you can carry a tin of mints in your pocket and chew one when the time is right.

The only real downside to the Hims Hard Mints system is that the tin could be a little slimmer; unless you’re planning to have an especially raucous week of fun, there’s really no reason to carry more than a couple of mints at a time. By comparison, the individually wrapped tablets from Ro and BlueChew are even more convenient, as you can pocket a pair of these and leave the rest of your prescription safe at home.

Taste

In our testing process, we’ve evaluated the flavor of every major chewable or dissolving ED tablet on the market, and Hims Hard Mints taste the best. They’re more of a wintergreen/peppermint flavor than the somewhat spearmint essence you get from BlueChew’s vardenafil, which is the closest comparison for flavor on the market. BlueChew’s other flavors are fruity but slightly artificial, Ro Sparks is fruity and unpleasant, and Rugiet’s Ready and Boost products are flavored chocolate-mint and cinnamon, respectively.

Of all these options, the straightforward mintiness of Hims Hard Mints does an effective job of masking any medicinal flavor. Mint also makes the most sense in an erotic context, where you want your breath to smell nice.

Hims Hard Mints are chewable ED medications compounded in mint-flavored tablets that look and taste like popular breath mints you might find at the checkout counter of any grocery store. They even have the little green speckling on the white tablets to visually indicate their mintiness, and they come in a slide-top tin you can carry around in your pocket much more comfortably than a prescription pill bottle.

The mints are designed to contain one or two out of three popular ED medications: sildenafil, tadalafil, and vardenafil. They’re available in prescriptions intended for as-needed use or, for certain ingredients, daily use.

Keep in mind that these mints are not designed to work sublingually; the drugs don’t pass through oral membranes to enter the bloodstream before normal metabolism.10 You eat them, they endure hepatic metabolism, and they take the same amount of time to work as if you’d taken them in normal pill form.11 That differentiates them from a competing product from Ro, called Ro Sparks, which are designed to dissolve under the tongue and potentially work a little faster. Hard Mints have a little more dose flexibility than Sparks, though, and their lower available doses make them a better choice for most men new to ED medications.

To understand how Hims Hard Mints work, we need to look at the way that each of the drugs available in Hard Mint form functions to improve erectile health. None of these drugs will just give you an erection; that’s not what things like Viagra are actually designed to do. Instead, they create the environment for you to achieve a healthy erection in response to stimuli.

All three belong to a specific drug class called PDE5 inhibitors, though there are some noteworthy differences among them.

As PDE5 inhibitors, they each reduce the expression of phosphodiesterase-5, an enzyme that helps your body stop having an erection after climax or the removal of sufficient stimuli.12 Without it, you would have an erection that never went away (not a great idea). But if your body’s timing is off, or blood flow is insufficient to outperform PDE5’s influence, you could experience ED.

By inhibiting PDE5, these drugs allow blood to flow freely when you’re stimulated, and they prevent an erection from going away before you’re done using it.13 At the right dose, they should be strong enough to satisfy your sexual needs but weak enough that your erection can go away naturally after intercourse.

The drugs in question are sildenafil (generic for Viagra), tadalafil (generic for Cialis), and vardenafil (generic for Levitra). Let’s take a closer look at each so you know what to discuss with a consulting physician about what might be best for you:

Hims is a massive telehealth company whose reputation reflects its efficiency and usefulness in many more categories than just ED support. The site also offers prescription and nonprescription treatments for hair loss, skin care, sexual wellness, weight loss, and more.

Hims and Hers Inc., Hims’ parent company, has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau (BBB), as well as a customer rating of 3.78 out of a possible 5 stars after more than 6,000 reviews. That’s a little below the rating we gave Hims on our review of its complete platform and suite of services. Most of the negative reviews here are related to medications not working as intended or difficulty canceling subscriptions. In fairness to Hims, the medications it offers, even when shown to be remarkably effective in studies, won’t work for everyone. That said, certain aspects of the company’s customer service have suffered in recent years, including the removal of its once very helpful live chat feature, so it still has room to improve on that front.

On Trustpilot, the picture is similar, with a rating of 3 out of 5 stars after another 6,000+ reviews. Like the issues described on the BBB website, negative reviews expressed frustration with delivery speeds, cancellation issues, and medication efficacy.

Ultimately, compared to its most direct competitors in men’s telemedicine, Hims boasts a good record. It fares much better than Ro and Rugiet on BBB, though not on Trustpilot, and it outpaces BlueChew and Strut Health on both platforms.

Based on their available doses, Hims Hard Mints are a pretty good choice for men who are new to ED medications and for those who’ve had success at the specific doses that Hims offers. They add a measure of convenience that many men will appreciate, and they could be especially useful for men who have difficulty swallowing pills (though traditional ED tablets are quite small).

Hims Hard Mints could also be a great choice for men who’ve found that they need a slightly higher dose of daily tadalafil than the usual 2.5mg or 5mg prescribed in pill form. Hims’ vardenafil Hard Mints for daily use come in 8.5mg and 11.2mg doses, but they’re the same low price as the company’s pill form of daily vardenafil. That makes them a potent and economical choice that you don’t see from Hims’ direct competition.

Who might want to look elsewhere?

Of course, since Hims Hard Mints all contain PDE5 inhibitors, they’d be a bad choice for anyone who wouldn’t qualify for a prescription. That can include men with heart trouble, as well as other issues, which we discuss in the next section.17

Hard Mints might also be a poor choice for men seeking to try daily tadalafil for the first time, as initial doses for that medication often start at 2.5mg or 5mg, not the 8.5mg and 11.2mg doses you can get in Hard Mint form. If it works for you, a more traditional starting dosage of a single medication would be more economical while generally posing a lower risk of side effects.

The most important consideration when it comes to the safety of Hims Hard Mints is that they’re only available by prescription. A Hims-affiliated physician or nurse practitioner will review your medical history to determine your eligibility for treatment.

That level of scrutiny helps protect you from dangerous contraindications and should safeguard you against the most severe potential side effects. Among these, cardiovascular risk factors are of high concern, and your consulting physician may require blood pressure readings or a self-reported fitness assessment before prescribing any PDE5 inhibitor.

However, PDE5 inhibitors have other specific, often less serious side effect risks that don’t all preclude potential patients from taking them. Your doctor can give you a prescription, but you might still have an adverse reaction to the medication.

For example, flushing and headaches are common with PDE5 inhibitors, with a higher percentage of sildenafil users reporting them than tadalafil users.18 Conversely, a higher percentage of tadalafil users report muscle pain than sildenafil users.19 This goes back to the collateral inhibition of other PDE enzymes that we discussed earlier, whereby a specific PDE5 inhibitor may unintentionally inhibit PDE1, 6, or 11, causing particular side effects.

Vardenafil is closer in its molecular structure to sildenafil than tadalafil, but it’s a newer medication than sildenafil, and it does a better job of exclusively targeting PDE5. Specifically, it seems to avoid PDE6, meaning that it doesn’t cause the color perception effects associated with sildenafil.20 That said, vardenafil can interfere with the timing of heartbeats, making it a nonstarter for men with things like prolonged QT syndrome.21

Ultimately, the picture of cardiac health and potential contraindications is complicated enough that these drugs will remain prescription-only for the foreseeable future. This ensures a baseline of safety for men with ED, and you should certainly bring up any concerns about heart health or other potential issues during your intake.

As with many Hims products, you can save money by investing in larger quantities of Hard Mints and spreading your deliveries out over a longer time span. This saves you money in two ways. First, Hims gives you a discount for making a larger purchase, effectively lowering your cost per dose if you have the funds to pay more up front. Second, since Hims charges a $5 processing fee per order, you’ll pay fewer of those fees over the course of a year when you spread out your deliveries.

Here’s how that works out for daily Hard Mints:

The picture for as-needed Hard Mints is a little different, with various quantities available per purchase. The cost per dose is flat across the board unless you want just four doses per month. In that case, the meds are a little pricier.

The costs listed here are the same for Hard Mints containing just tadalafil or vardenafil and for Hard Mints containing tadalafil and sildenafil combined. These prices also don’t reflect the additional $5 processing fee, but the same savings opportunity illustrated in the daily Hard Mints chart applies here, as well.

Because these are prescription medications, Hims doesn’t offer refunds or any kind of money-back guarantee. This is true of any product in the ED treatment space, however. If you want to try an ED treatment that offers some financial protection, and your ED isn’t particularly serious (perhaps it’s only occasional or you can often get just hard enough for penetration), you might look into physical devices like the Phoenix acoustic shockwave device, penis rings, or nutritional supplements. We go into more detail about these options in our alternatives section below.

To make sense of your options for treating ED outside of Hims Hard Mints, we should divide the market between similar prescription providers and alternatives to prescription intervention. Let’s start with available prescription alternatives.

Prescription alternatives to Hims Hard Mints

Hims Hard Mints are not the only chewable ED medication option on the market, nor are they necessarily the best choice for you. Other companies offer different drug and dose combinations, and even different flavors and delivery methods (e.g., lozenges instead of chewables). Many of those companies, and others, also offer telemedical access to traditional ED pills, as well, which can often be less expensive than more novel chewables.

Here’s a quick look at providers and options for prescription treatment outside of Hims Hard Mints:

Nonprescription ED treatments outside of Hims Hard Mints

If you’re looking for alternatives to Hims Hard Mints because you’d rather avoid the prescription route altogether, there are several options you can explore, some of which boast a bit more scientific credibility than others. Here, we explore those non-Rx options: