Quiet Tone Ingredients

Serving size one capsule, thirty servings a container. The blend row is footnoted on the artwork as “Daily Value (DV) not established”.

Ten rows, and the tenth is a door with eighteen names behind it. The first nine are vitamins and minerals, each with a weight and a percentage, and they occupy the top two-thirds of the printed panel.

Underneath them sits Proprietary Blend, 415.5 mg, followed by the eighteen botanicals and amino acids in this order: 1. Rhodiola Crenulata Extract (Rhodiola crenulata) (root), 2. Lutein, 3. Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) (root), 4. Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) (flower), 5. Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA), 6. Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis) (aerial), 7. Chinese Skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis) (root), 8. Chinese Hawthorn (Crataegus pinnatifida Bunge) (fruit), 9. Bacopa (Bacopa monnieri) (whole herb), 10. Magnolia (Magnolia officinalis) (bark), 11. Passion Flower (Passiflora incarnata) (flower), 12. Valerian (Valeriana officinalis) (root), 13. L-Theanine, 14. Oat Straw (Avena sativa) (straw), 15. L-Phenylalanine, 16. St John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) (aerial), 17. Hops (Humulus lupulus) (flower), 18. 5-HTP (Griffonia simplicifolia) (seed).

An ingredient declaration runs in descending order of weight, so rhodiola and lutein carry the largest shares of that figure and hops and 5-HTP the smallest. That sequence is the whole of what the artwork gives away about the split, and it is worth having: it rules out, for instance, a blend that is mostly L-theanine, because L-theanine sits thirteenth.

Each of the nine nutrient rows names a form in brackets, and the brackets are the part most people skip. A mineral is not one substance: the salt it arrives as decides how much of it crosses the gut wall, and two products showing the same milligram figure can deliver quite different amounts.

Forms read from the printed artwork. The comments are about the chemistry of each salt, not about what this capsule does.

Eleven of the eighteen blend names carry a plant part in brackets, which is more than most labels in this aisle bother with. It matters because a plant is not one ingredient. Root, leaf, flower, bark, fruit and seed carry different chemistry and have usually been studied for different things.

Parts read from the artwork. The right-hand column describes where each ingredient’s human research was done, not what this capsule contains of it.

Ten of those thirteen line up: the part in the brackets is the part the studies used. Two do not, and both are worth knowing before anyone quotes a trial at this bottle.

The rhodiola is crenulata rather than rosea, two different species whose literatures barely touch. Naming the species is the careful thing to do and this label does it, which is the reason the mismatch is visible at all.

The hawthorn is fruit. Every cardiology trial worth citing used a standardised extract of leaf with flower, from Crataegus monogyna and laevigata. Fruit preparations of Crataegus pinnatifida are a food and a traditional digestive, and the heart-failure evidence does not travel across that gap.

Three rows use the word: Rhodiola Crenulata Extract at the head of the blend, and the extract preparations implied by several of the botanical names beneath it. An extract is a concentrate, made by pulling the soluble fraction of a plant into a solvent and drying what comes out.

Two numbers make an extract comparable to another one. The first is the ratio, written as 4:1 or 10:1, meaning how many kilograms of raw plant went into one kilogram of powder. The second is the standardisation marker, written as a percentage of a named compound: 5% rosavins, 2.5% withanolides, 0.8% apigenin.

This artwork carries neither, for any row. That is ordinary for a proprietary blend and it is the reason a milligram figure inside one cannot be compared with a milligram figure in a trial even when both are known. Ten milligrams of a 10:1 concentrate and ten milligrams of ground leaf are the same weight and different products.

Two of those four are present here and two are not, and the supplement facts page prints the panel exactly as it stands so anyone can check that against the bottle that arrives.

This is the section whose job is arithmetic, and it is confined here so the rest of the page can describe the capsule instead of arguing with it.

415.5 mg is the whole blend. Eighteen names share it. Divided evenly that is about 23 mg each, and no formulator is obliged to divide evenly: descending order is compatible with rhodiola taking 200 mg and the bottom six taking a milligram between them.

Six of those seven single-ingredient doses are larger on their own than the average share of the entire blend, and chamomile's is more than three times the blend itself. That comparison is not an accusation. It is the only honest way to hold a trial dose beside a label that gives one total.

The fair reading runs both ways. A formulator combining eighteen calming plants may believe the combination does something the parts do not, and a critical appraisal of how herbal remedies should be judged sets out how that claim would have to be tested. Nothing of that kind has been run on this capsule.

Three entries sit under the panel: hypromellose (vegetable capsule), magnesium stearate (vegetable), silicon dioxide. Between them they are the shell and the two agents that keep a powder flowing through a filling machine.

What is absent from that list is as useful as what is on it. There is no sugar, no sweetener, no colour and no flavouring, which is the practical difference between a capsule and a gummy in this aisle. There is also no gelatin, no lactose and no soy lecithin among the three entries.