If a woman takes a BlueChew tablet, she’ll be ingesting the same active ingredients used in erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra, Cialis, or Levitra. These medications increase blood flow by relaxing blood vessels, and that mechanism works in female genital tissue too. The effects won’t be dramatic or dangerous for most women, but they also won’t work the way many people expect.
What BlueChew Actually Contains
BlueChew sells chewable tablets of three medications: sildenafil (generic Viagra), tadalafil (generic Cialis), and vardenafil (generic Levitra). All three belong to a class of drugs called PDE5 inhibitors, which work by widening blood vessels. They are FDA-approved for treating erectile dysfunction in men. They are not approved for any use in women, and the chewable tablet form itself hasn’t been separately approved by the FDA even for men.
How It Affects a Woman’s Body
The clitoris and penis share similar tissue structure, including the same chemical pathway that controls blood flow during arousal. When a woman takes sildenafil, it increases blood flow to genital tissue just as it does in men. A study in postmenopausal women found that a single 50 mg dose of sildenafil significantly increased blood flow velocity in the clitoral arteries and reduced resistance in the uterine arteries within one hour. In practical terms, this means more engorgement and potentially more natural lubrication.
What it doesn’t do is create desire. The drug works on blood vessels, not on the brain. A woman who takes BlueChew may notice increased physical sensitivity or warmth in the genital area, but it won’t generate arousal, interest, or an urge to have sex where none existed before.
Does It Improve Sexual Function in Women?
The research results are mixed and depend heavily on what problem a woman is trying to solve. In clinical trials of postmenopausal women with arousal difficulties, sildenafil improved physical arousal markers compared to placebo, with significant improvements on five out of six arousal measures. But there’s a key caveat: these improvements only showed up in women who didn’t also have low desire. Women whose primary issue was a lack of interest in sex saw no meaningful benefit.
A more recent trial testing a topical sildenafil cream found that women with arousal disorder reported increased arousal sensation scores compared to placebo. Their sexual distress scores also dropped by about 7 points (considered clinically meaningful), versus only 2 points for placebo. However, neither group reported a significant increase in satisfying sexual encounters overall. So while the physical signs of arousal improved, the full experience of satisfying sex didn’t reliably follow.
This pattern keeps repeating in the research. PDE5 inhibitors can address the plumbing, but for many women, sexual difficulties involve desire, emotional connection, or other factors that a blood-flow drug simply can’t reach.
Side Effects Women Can Expect
Women experience the same side effects men do, because the drug affects blood vessels throughout the body, not just in the genitals. A systematic review pooling data from multiple trials found that women taking PDE5 inhibitors had significantly higher rates of headaches, flushing (a warm, red feeling in the face and chest), and changes in vision compared to placebo. Nausea and nasal congestion also showed up frequently. Most side effects were mild to moderate.
The more serious risk applies equally to men and women: these drugs should never be combined with nitrate medications, which are prescribed for chest pain and heart conditions. The combination can cause sudden, severe drops in blood pressure. Research from the American Heart Association found that sildenafil paired with nitrates caused large and protracted decreases in blood pressure and coronary blood flow, with the potential for a fatal outcome in people with narrowed heart vessels. This isn’t a theoretical warning. It’s one of the most dangerous drug interactions in medicine.
Pregnancy and Breastfeeding
Limited data from nursing mothers taking sildenafil for pulmonary hypertension (a separate medical use) suggest very little of the drug passes into breast milk. A fully breastfed infant would receive roughly 0.06% of a therapeutic infant dose, which is far below any level expected to cause harm. That said, these numbers come from a small number of case reports, not large safety studies. No formal safety classification exists for sildenafil use during pregnancy in otherwise healthy women, and no one should take it while pregnant without medical guidance.
How It Differs From Drugs Made for Women
Two medications are actually FDA-approved for low sexual desire in premenopausal women, and they work in a completely different way. Flibanserin (Addyi) is a daily pill that acts on serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine receptors in the brain. It boosts the brain chemicals involved in desire and arousal over time. Bremelanotide (Vyleesi) is an injection taken before sex that activates a different brain pathway. Both target the desire side of the equation rather than blood flow.
This distinction matters. Sildenafil and other PDE5 inhibitors have been studied off-label for women, but reviews consistently note their limited utility for treating low desire. If a woman’s main concern is not feeling interested in sex, a BlueChew tablet won’t address that. If her concern is difficulty with physical arousal despite wanting sex, the blood-flow effect may offer some benefit, though no PDE5 inhibitor is approved or consistently proven effective for this use in women.
The Bottom Line on Safety
A single BlueChew tablet is unlikely to harm a healthy woman who isn’t on nitrates or blood pressure medication. She may feel flushed, get a headache, or notice some increased genital sensitivity. She won’t experience anything close to what a man with erectile dysfunction experiences, because the drug is solving a specific mechanical problem that she likely doesn’t have. The most common outcome, based on the clinical evidence, is mild side effects with underwhelming sexual benefits.