I went to Anime Expo as press expecting to write about the usual blockbusters. Instead, I fell down a rabbit hole with a teenage apothecary — and started fact-checking her medicine cabinet.
Anime Expo takes over the Los Angeles Convention Center at the start of every July like a beautiful, sleepless fever dream. Half a million people, wall-to-wall cosplay, and an industry firehose of trailers, screenings, and “you heard it here first” reveals. I was there on a press badge, notebook out, ready to cover the heavy hitters. And there were plenty: a Solo Leveling film, a Cyberpunk: Edgerunners sequel premiering to a packed arena, the return of what feels like every franchise everyone loves.
But the thing that actually hijacked my brain wasn’t the mech or the art. It was a period drama about a girl who tastes poison for fun.
If you haven’t met The Apothecary Diaries yet, here’s the elevator pitch: Maomao, a whip-smart young apothecary raised in a red-light district, gets kidnapped and sold into service in the emperor’s rear palace. She plans to keep her head down, until the imperial infants start mysteriously dying and she can’t help herself. She solves it (spoiler for episode one: it’s the makeup), and from there becomes the palace’s unofficial poison expert and medical detective. Season 3 lands this October, with an original film, The Deceased Empress’ Treasure, opening in Japan in December. In other words: if you’re going to get obsessed, now is the efficient time to do it.
Here’s the detail that turned my fandom into a story. At the expo, the show’s director, Norihiro Naganuma, unveiled his next project, a wild action series where ninjas awaken dinosaur powers by applying a special pigment like makeup. Sit with that for a second. The man who opened The Apothecary Diaries with makeup as a poison (lead-based face powder quietly killing royal babies) is following it up with makeup as a superpower.
That through-line is basically the thesis of my entire wellness beat: the stuff we put on and in our bodies: the powders, potions, teas, and tinctures are never neutral. It’s always somewhere on the spectrum between medicine and poison. And the reason The Apothecary Diaries is such a sneaky-good wellness watch is that Maomao says this out loud, constantly, “the dose makes the poison.”
So I did the responsible-adult version of a deep dive. I went through the remedies the show actually depicts and asked a simple question of each one: is this real, or is it anime? Here’s what held up…and what would land you in the ER.
The Remedies that Actually Hold Up in The Apothecary Diaries
✅ Ginger tea for nausea
This is the scene that started it for me. At a palace tea party, when a sweet drink turns out to be a bad idea for one of the guests, hot ginger tea gets served instead, and Maomao treats ginger’s warming, stomach-settling reputation as a simple fact. Good news: it is fact. Ginger is one of the better-studied natural remedies for nausea, with real evidence behind its use for motion sickness, morning sickness, and post-treatment queasiness. If the show gave out gold stars, this one earns it.
✅ Honey, applied to skin and wounds
Honey turns up all over the series as a valuable material (there’s a whole subplot involving a beekeeping family), and its use as a soothing, protective salve tracks with reality. Medical-grade honey is genuinely used in modern wound care. It’s mildly antibacterial and helps create a moist healing environment. Honey is also a legitimately evidence-backed soother for coughs and sore throats. Keep this one in mind; it comes with a giant asterisk later.
✅ The dietary cure for a “mysterious wasting illness”
One of the show’s smartest arcs centers on a sickness that strikes the well-fed palace elite who eat gleaming, polished white rice, while poorer people eating coarser, rougher food stay healthy. Maomao’s fix isn’t a potion. It’s the menu. This maps almost perfectly onto real-world beriberi, a vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficiency that plagued rice-dependent societies precisely because milling strips the nutrient out of the grain. The historical fix was exactly what the show implies: eat less-refined food, such as whole grains, legumes, seeds…and the “illness” disappears. It’s the original “your diet is your medicine” plotline, and it’s legit.
⚠️✅ Moxibustion and the traditional toolkit
Maomao routinely reaches for the authentic practices of her setting: pulse diagnosis, herbal infusions, and moxibustion (burning dried mugwort near specific points on the body). These are real, centuries-old techniques still practiced today. The honest caveat: the modern evidence for moxibustion is thin and mixed, so file it under “genuine traditional medicine” rather than “clinically proven.” Real practice, unproven results.
✅ “Eat well, move your body, and stop chasing miracles”
Late in the story, a powerful woman becomes obsessed with a legendary “Elixir of Immortality.” Maomao privately rolls her eyes and prescribes the least glamorous protocol imaginable instead: eat nutritious food, exercise regularly, live a decent life. Honestly? That’s the most evidence-based line in the entire series, and a quietly savage takedown of every anti-aging fad in my inbox.
The Ones with an Asterisk
⚠️ Jasmine tea in pregnancy
The show uses jasmine tea as a teaching moment: Maomao warns it shouldn’t be given to pregnant women because it can act as an abortifacient, and stresses that dosage and knowledge matter before you consume any herb. The spirit of the lesson is bang-on. Herbs are drugs, and “natural” doesn’t mean “harmless.” But don’t panic over your afternoon cup: ordinary jasmine tea is generally considered safe in moderation, and the show is dramatizing traditional associations for narrative punch. Take the principle, not the literal warning, to heart.
Aphrodisiacs ⚠️
Early on, Maomao whips up an “aphrodisiac” (in the anime, a suspiciously effective chocolate treat). Cute on screen. In actual history, the aphrodisiacs of this era often relied on cantharides, “Spanish fly” which is a toxic blistering agent that can cause serious harm, not romance. A rare case where the anime is tamer than the real thing. Please do not go looking.
The Ones that Could Actually Kill You
❌ Lead-based face powder
The remedy here is knowledge, and the “cure” is stop. The show’s entire opening mystery, the dying imperial infants, resolves when Maomao realizes the culprit is the fashionable white face powder the high consorts wear. This isn’t invented: chronic lead poisoning from lead-based cosmetics is a real historical phenomenon, documented for centuries right up until such products were finally banned. The lesson translates cleanly to now: read your labels. And when in doubt, scan the product’s barcode with the app Yuka! You’ll quickly learn what is safe and not safe for consumption.
❌ Immortality elixirs
That legendary anti-aging elixir characters keep chasing? In the real world, the “immortality” elixirs of ancient alchemy were frequently mercury and arsenic-based, and they killed the very emperors and nobles who drank them in pursuit of living forever. The dark irony the show is leaning on is entirely historical.
❌ Blowfish (fugu)
Maomao is delighted by the tingling numbness of blowfish poison. She jokes it’s how she’d want to go. Real talk: that’s tetrodotoxin, one of the most potent natural poisons known, with no antidote. The show’s fascination is played for character comedy. In life, there is no safe home version of this. Zero.
❌ Honey — for babies
Remember that honey asterisk? Here it is. A key subplot reveals that a character nearly died from eating honey as an infant. This is devastatingly accurate: honey can cause infant botulism and should never be given to children under 12 months old. It’s arguably the single most useful public-health fact the series smuggles into your brain. The same ingredient that’s medicine for an adult’s cough is genuinely dangerous for a baby. The dose, and the body, make the poison.
The Real Takeaway I Brought Home from the Expo
What makes The Apothecary Diaries land for a wellness-minded millennial audience isn’t that Maomao is always right. It’s that she models the exact literacy so much of modern wellness culture skips: ask what’s in it, ask how much, and ask what it does before you put it in your body. She’s suspicious of miracle cures, respectful of real ones, and allergic to hype. (Also, apparently, to buckwheat.)
Standing on that convention floor, watching one director turn makeup from poison into power across two different shows, I realized that’s the whole game: with cosmetics, with supplements, with the “natural” tea somebody swears will fix your hormones. Nothing you consume is neutral. The difference between a remedy and a hazard is almost never the ingredient. It’s the knowledge.
Season 3 arrives in October. I’ll be watching with a notebook…and, for the record, ginger tea.
This article is for entertainment and general information only and isn’t medical advice. Herbs and supplements can interact with medications and conditions. Talk to a qualified healthcare provider before trying anything new, and never use honey for children under one year old.
Continue Exploring Natural Remedies, Honestly
Maomao’s rule, that the dose makes the poison, is the same lens we bring to the wellness aisle. For the calm-shelf version, see which adaptogens for stress actually earn their place, then the deep dive on ashwagandha, its benefits and its real cautions. The same read-the-label skepticism carries into whether functional mushroom supplements are worth it. It all sits under the Coherence pillar on nervous system regulation, our field guide to a considered Pantry. And for the tea side of the story, from ginger to jasmine, see how tea culture became the new wine culture.
