Hard Mints review

What you are actually buying

A compounded chewable mint containing a PDE5 inhibitor, from $30 a month, with the page also advertising doses “as low as $2”. Cheaper than most of the compounded market and roughly in line with plain generics.

Which PDE5 inhibitor is a harder question than it should be. The storefront calls it a “3-in-1” mint and says it helps you “get hard quicker and stay hard longer”. The safety page is where you learn that Hard Mints exist as tadalafil, vardenafil, and tadalafil plus vardenafil — three different products under one name.

The safety writing is genuinely good

This is not a grudging compliment. Hims links an Important Safety Information page from every product tile, and the text on it does the things this site spends most of its time asking for.

• It names nitrates and guanylate cyclase stimulators, gives riociguat as a worked example, and says what happens — blood pressure dropping to an unsafe level.
• It names six alpha-blockers by brand: Flomax, Cardura, Hytrin, Minipress, Uroxatral, Rapaflo. A man on a prostate drug does not necessarily know it is an alpha-blocker, and this is the only page in the comparison that closes that gap.
• It carries the four-hour rule with the consequence attached.
• It covers NAION and sudden hearing loss as stop-and-call-now events.
• It warns against combining with other ED treatments without supervision.

The compounding disclosure is in bold in two places rather than tucked into a footer. On a compounded product sold at this volume, that is the right call and most competitors do not make it.

And then there is no dose

We could not find a strength on the storefront, the product tile, the safety page, or the FAQ. For a compounded medicine that omission carries more weight than it would for a generic, because there is no reference label to look it up in. A box of generic tadalafil says 5 mg or 20 mg. A Hard Mint says mint.

This matters in three practical ways. You cannot tell whether you are starting low, which is what a man over 50 should be doing. You cannot tell whether you are doubling up if you already keep tadalafil in a drawer. And if you get side effects, you cannot tell your doctor what you took.

The generics are the quiet good deal

On the same page, below the mints, Hims sells plain generic sildenafil from $22/mo and generic tadalafil from $24/mo. These are FDA-approved drugs with real labels and published strengths, and they are the cheapest things on the page.

For most men over 50 who have not tried an ED drug before, that is the better starting point — one drug, a known dose, a label in the box, and an easier conversation with your own doctor. How sildenafil and tadalafil actually differ.

What we would want fixed

Publish the strength. Everything else on this page is done to a standard that makes the missing number stand out rather than blend in.

Say which drug is in the mint on the storefront. Making a man open the safety page to discover whether he is buying tadalafil or vardenafil is the wrong way round.

State the cancellation terms before checkout. Billing complaints, not safety, are the most common grievance in this category.

The bottom line

A serious company that treats the risks seriously and the product specification casually. If you buy here, our advice is to start with the plain generic, and if you move to a mint, ask support in writing what is in it and at what strength before the second month bills. What to ask before you buy anything online.