Do BoomBoom nasal sticks work? What the studies actually show

Do BoomBoom nasal sticks work? For most of what people want, yes. They make your nose feel cool and open, they can ease nausea, and they give you a quick hit of freshness.

The interesting part is how. That cool, open feeling is real, but your nose never opens. Menthol switches on the cold sensors inside it, and your brain reads cold as open.

Two other things about these sticks are worth knowing. They can take the edge off nausea, but not because of the mint. And the sensor menthol switches on is the same one migraine researchers keep running into.

What is in a nasal stick, or nasal inhaler?

A BoomBoom nasal stick, sometimes called a nasal inhaler, is a small tube with a cotton wick inside. The wick is soaked in menthol plus essential oils like eucalyptus, peppermint, and spearmint. You hold it under one nostril and breathe in.

Menthol is the active part. It is the ingredient in mint that produces a cooling feeling. Peppermint oil contains a little menthol on its own, but nasal sticks add more on top of the oils. The oils handle the scent. The menthol does the work.

And that cooling is the key to the whole product, because of one fact: menthol does not actually make anything cold. It triggers the nerves that sense cold, so your body feels a chill that is not really there. It is the same reason a strong mint makes your mouth feel cool.

Do nasal sticks actually open your nose?

No. Every study that has measured the nose before and after menthol found no real change.

Scientists have tested this since 1983. They use a tool called rhinomanometry, which measures how hard air has to work to get through your nose. If menthol were truly opening the nose, air would flow more easily and this tool would show it. Across study after study, it does not.

Study	Did the nose measure more open?	Did it feel more open?
Burrow and Eccles, 1983 (about 40 people)	No change in how easily air flowed	Yes, most people felt cooler and more open
Eccles, 1990 (62 people with colds)	No, menthol was no better than a fake lozenge	Yes, clearly better than the fake lozenge
Lindemann, 2008 (18 people)	No change in how easily air flowed	Yes, 16 of 18 people felt they breathed better
Kenia, 2008 (42 children)	No change in how much air moved	Yes, they felt more open

The same pattern shows up every time. The feeling improves. The measurement does not.

You might wonder if the measuring tool just was not sensitive enough to catch a small change. The 1983 study ruled that out. In the same experiment, they also had people exercise, which really does open the nose, and the tool caught it right away. But exercise created no cooling feeling. So the tool reliably picks up a real opening, and with menthol it found none, only the feeling.

The 1990 study is the most careful one, so it is worth understanding what it found, because it is easy to misread. Researchers gave people with colds either a menthol lozenge or a fake lozenge that looked and tasted similar, then tracked them for two hours.

Both groups got a little less stuffy over those two hours. That is just colds easing off on their own with time, and it happened in the menthol group and the fake group by the same amount. Menthol did not beat the fake lozenge on the actual measurement. The one thing menthol changed was how open people felt. The lead researcher, Ron Eccles at Cardiff University, had reached that conclusion seven years earlier: no evidence was found for any decongestant action by menthol.

A real decongestant works differently. When people take one, they feel less stuffy and the tool measures the nose actually opening, and a review of the research confirms both happen together. With menthol, only the feeling shows up.

Why nasal sticks make your nose feel open anyway

Your nose is lined with cold sensors. When you breathe, the air moving through is slightly cool, so your brain has learned to treat a cool feeling inside your nose as a sign that air is flowing freely and your nose is open. Menthol hijacks that. It switches the cold sensors on directly, so your brain feels the cool and assumes the nose has opened, even though no air is moving any differently and nothing has widened. The sensor it acts on is called TRPM8, the same one that picks up a cold breeze or an ice cube.

How do we know the effect comes from this sensor and not just from the minty smell? In a 1988 experiment, Eccles and colleagues tested 40 people. Menthol exists in a few slightly different molecular shapes. Some shapes fit the cold sensor and switch it on. Others do not fit it, but still smell exactly like mint. When people inhaled the shapes that only smelled minty, their noses did not feel any different. Only the shape that fits the sensor gave that cool, open feeling. If the feeling came from the smell, every minty shape would have worked. Only one did, which points to the sensor, not the scent.

That matters because of what the sensor is normally for. Zhao and colleagues found that how open a nose felt tracked how much it cooled as air went past, not how much room the air had. Your nose does not measure space. It reads temperature and works backward to space. Menthol hands it the temperature reading directly, which is why the illusion is so hard to argue with.

If it only changes the feeling, is a nasal stick still worth using?

A stick does not touch whatever is blocking your nose. It changes how blocked you feel. The researchers who showed menthol does not open the nose still argue that counts, and their reason is simple: the feeling is what keeps you up at night, not the measurement.

Which leaves one question. Is the feeling just suggestion? No. The mint shapes that smell identical but do not fit the cold sensor did nothing at all, so the relief follows the sensor, not the scent.

So the honest limit is comfort, not repair. A stick makes a blocked nose feel better for a while. If a cold or allergies are doing the blocking, it leaves that exactly where it was.

Do nasal sticks give you energy and focus?

A nasal stick can make you feel more awake and refreshed, the way splashing cold water on your face does. Whether it does anything past that feeling is less clear. Most of the "peppermint boosts your brain" idea comes from a 2008 study by Moss and colleagues, but that study compared peppermint to no smell at all, so people knew exactly what they were getting. Better-controlled work has not backed it up. When Heuberger and Ilmberger tested peppermint on a standard alertness task in 2010, the boost did not show up. And a 2009 review by Rachel Herz that examined 18 studies found the effects of scents on mood and behavior are better explained by learned associations and expectation than by the chemicals acting on the body. Tell people a scent will energize them and they report feeling energized, whether the scent does anything or not.

There is one exception worth mentioning. In a 2018 trial by Kennedy and colleagues, 24 people swallowed capsules of peppermint oil or a matching dummy capsule without knowing which, and the larger dose improved their performance on a demanding attention task an hour and three hours later. But that is eating a large dose, not a quick sniff. The fair summary: the refreshed feeling is real, but a measurable boost to focus or energy from sniffing a stick has not been shown.

Do nasal sticks help with nausea?

Yes, but probably not for the reason you would guess.

When you feel nauseous, sniffing something from a stick can help. Researchers wanted to know what was actually doing the work, so they gave nauseated patients one of three things to sniff, all through the same slow, deep breathing: peppermint, rubbing alcohol, or plain salt water. All three worked equally well. The peppermint was no better than the salt water.

The thing that helped was not the smell at all. It was the slow, controlled breathing that using the stick forces you to do. A later study confirmed it: slow breathing on its own worked just as well as slow breathing plus peppermint.

This matters because it says something about the whole product. A nasal stick makes you stop, hold something to your nose, and take a long, deliberate breath. Based on those two studies, that breath is the part doing the work, and it happens whether the wick smells like peppermint or nothing at all.

Can nasal sticks trigger migraines?

Nobody has answered this one, and it is where the science gets genuinely interesting.

The cold sensor that menthol switches on, TRPM8, keeps showing up in migraine research. Several large studies of people's genes have found that a version of this sensor is linked to migraine risk. People who carry the version of the gene that builds fewer of these sensors get fewer migraines, and they also feel cold pain less. Fewer sensors, less migraine.

That is about the sensor you are born with. The next question is what happens when you switch it on, and lab studies point the same direction. When researchers activated this sensor in animals, it triggered the wave of brain activity that causes migraine aura, the flashing lights and blind spots some people get before a migraine, and it released the same pain chemical that the newest migraine drugs are built to block. This is also why cold itself, like biting into ice cream, can set off a headache in some people.

You may have heard that peppermint oil helps headaches. It does. Rubbed on the forehead as an oil, menthol is about as effective as a normal dose of aspirin for tension headaches, and a standard remedy in Germany. But tension headache is a different condition from migraine, and the forehead is a different place from the nerves inside your nose.

Past that, nobody can say why it cuts both ways. The researchers who reviewed this are blunt about it: menthol eases headaches in some people and sets them off in others, and which one you get seems to depend on what triggers your headaches to begin with. There is no way to know in advance which one you are.

What does that mean for a nasal stick used several times a day? Nobody has tested it. No study has given these sticks to migraine sufferers and tracked their headaches, so this is not a warning. But if you get migraines and notice the stick lines up with them, that is worth taking seriously.

Can you overuse nasal sticks, or get hooked on them?

You will feel it less over time. The only study to track daily menthol use found that the cooling sensation faded over about five days of regular use. The feeling got weaker. Since the cooling is the whole point, the natural response is to reach for it more often to chase the same hit.

You cannot get physically hooked on it. The nasal sprays people worry about, the medicated decongestant kind, cause real dependence: they shrink the blood vessels in your nose, the vessels rebound bigger when the spray wears off, and you end up needing it just to breathe normally. Menthol does not touch those blood vessels, so none of that happens. There is no rebound and no withdrawal. The most that can happen is a habit, since the cooling feels good and fades fast, but a habit is not the same as a physical addiction.

Does it have drugs in it? No. Just menthol and mint oils. No nicotine, no stimulants, no medication.

Are nasal sticks safe?

For short-term use in healthy adults, nothing in the research points to a problem. There is also no safety study on nasal sticks specifically, so that is an absence of evidence rather than a clean bill of health.

Past about a week, daily use has not been studied at all. The five-day study above is the longest look anyone has taken. No one has checked what sniffing menthol several times a day does to the nose over weeks or months, so that part is simply unknown.

Strong oils can irritate sensitive noses, and everyone reacts a little differently. Nasal sticks are often marketed as completely safe, but that is a broader promise than the research can back up. Anyone with a long-term breathing condition, anyone pregnant, or anyone thinking about using it for a child should check with a doctor first.

The bottom line on BoomBoom nasal sticks

BoomBoom nasal sticks do most of what people buy them for. They make your nose feel cool and open, they refresh you, and they can ease nausea. Those effects are real.

The surprise is how they work. The cool, open feeling comes from switching on a cold sensor, not from actually widening your nose. And the nausea relief comes from the slow breath the stick makes you take, not from the peppermint.

That distinction is the whole decision. If you want to feel less blocked for a while, a stick does that well. If the goal is to change how you actually breathe, a stick is not the tool, because it never changes what your nose is doing in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

Do BoomBoom nasal sticks work?

BoomBoom nasal sticks work for a cool, open feeling, and that part is well documented. They do not physically open your nose or clear a blockage from a cold or allergies. The menthol switches on the cold sensors in your nose so it feels open, even when nothing inside has changed.

Are BoomBoom sticks addictive?

BoomBoom nasal sticks are not addictive in a chemical sense. Menthol does not cause the rebound stuffiness that makes some medicated sprays hard to quit, and there is no withdrawal. A nasal stick can become a habit, though, because it gives a quick reward that fades and makes you reach for it again.

Do BoomBoom sticks have drugs in them?

BoomBoom nasal sticks contain menthol and mint oils like eucalyptus, peppermint, and spearmint. No nicotine, no stimulants, no medication.

Can nasal sticks give you headaches?

No one has studied whether nasal sticks cause headaches. The cold sensor menthol activates has a mixed link to headaches: menthol oil on the forehead is a proven tension-headache remedy, while the same sensor is tied to migraine risk in some people. Researchers cannot yet say which way it goes for a given person. If you get migraines and notice a pattern with a nasal stick, it is worth paying attention to.

Nasal sticks or nasal strips?

A nasal strip physically pulls your nostrils open from the outside. A nasal stick, or nasal inhaler, uses menthol to make your nose feel open. If you want the nose itself to actually widen, that is the strip.