Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
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Candana is the scented heartwood of the white sandalwood tree, Santalum album. In Ayurveda it is a cooling herb. Healers grind the wood to a paste and spread it on hot, itchy skin.
It is also taken as a fine powder or as a cold drink. Old texts use it for thirst, for the heat of a fever, and for burning when you pass urine. The oil is used on the skin and as a scent.
Here is the short verdict. The tradition behind Candana is deep and very old. Good human trials are thin, so long use is not proof that it works.
No one has shown how Candana works in a living body. What we have is lab work.
Most of that work looks at the wood oil. Its main parts, alpha-santalol and beta-santalol, calm swelling in skin cells in a dish. They also slow the growth of some germs and fungi in a dish.
Ayurveda tells it a different way. Candana is seen as cool, sweet and bitter, and is used to lower pitta, the body heat and sharpness in a person. That is a traditional model of the body, not a lab result.
What happens in a dish often does not happen on a person. Read all of this as a best guess, not as a fact.
You will meet Candana in a few main forms. The wood is the base of all of them.
Heartwood powder is the classic form. It is mixed with water, milk or rose water to make a paste for the skin, or stirred into a cold drink.
A wood billet rubbed on a wet stone gives the same paste in the old way.
A cold water soak, left overnight and strained, is used as a drink. Tablets and blended powders are sold too.
The steam-distilled oil is used on the skin, in creams, and as a scent. Incense sticks are made from the dust. The oil is not meant to be swallowed.
Candana has been used in India for well over two thousand years. It appears in the Vedic hymns and in the classical Ayurvedic texts of Charaka and Sushruta.
It spread far beyond India. Chinese medicine uses it as tan xiang, and Tibetan medicine uses it as a cooling drug. Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples burn it and mark the skin with it.
That wide reach across several old systems is why its traditional standing is rated at the top tier.
Wild trees are now scarce and the trade is watched and limited by law in India and abroad.
See a doctor the same day if you notice blood in your urine, pain in your side or lower back, or if you pass much less urine than usual.
See a doctor soon if burning urine lasts more than two days, comes with fever or chills, or keeps coming back.
See a doctor if a rash spreads, weeps, blisters or is very painful, or if a skin problem has not settled after four weeks.
Get emergency help if your lips, tongue or throat swell, or if you struggle to breathe after using it. That can be a severe allergic reaction.
Evidence grades and traditional-use labels are explained in our methodology. Nothing here is medical advice.
Reviewed by the HealisticMD editorial team How we grade evidence →
The published evidence for Candana is weak or absent. That usually means no controlled trial has tested it, not that a trial found it ineffective — the two are different, and we grade only what has been published.
What it is typically used for, usual dose, cautions, and the study behind it where real trial data exists.
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