Cilantro Essential Oil Research Roundup: A Dated Survey

This is a dated survey of the published research on coriander and cilantro essential oil, searched on 2026-10-23, with one row per study and a link to the post that goes deeper where we have one. It is not an annual report and not a systematic review. The shortest honest summary: the literature is mostly laboratory and animal work, much of it on seed oil rather than the leaf oil we sell, and as far as my searches turned up, no human trial of cilantro leaf essential oil.

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How the search was run, and what it cannot see

I searched the Europe PMC database (which indexes MEDLINE/PubMed records) through its public search interface on 2026-10-23. The first query used the service's default fields; the rest were restricted to titles. Among them: "coriandrum sativum" AND "essential oil" AND (antibacterial OR antimicrobial); TITLE:(coriander OR cilantro OR "Coriandrum sativum") AND (oil OR oils) AND (antibacterial OR antimicrobial OR antifungal OR Candida OR Listeria OR Salmonella OR preservative OR food); TITLE:(coriander OR cilantro) AND (Candida OR dermatophyte OR fungal OR antifungal OR Trichophyton); and a title search pairing coriander or cilantro with oil and with anxiety, sleep, memory, neuro, trial, clinical, human or volunteers. I read the abstracts of the studies below through the same service and did not read full texts, so I report only what abstracts print. Limits: one database, mostly title-only terms after the first query, English-weighted terms, no Embase or Scopus, no hand-searching of references, no quality scoring, and the studies were chosen by me for relevance. Different searchers would find a different set, so treat this as a map with edges.

How to read an in vitro row against an in vivo row

In vitro means in glass: bacteria or yeast in a dish, or cells in a flask. It tells you whether a material has an effect under defined conditions. In vivo means in a living animal or person, where absorption, metabolism, dose route and everything else gets involved. Reasoning from that, the "what this means" column below defaults to "a lab result" until an animal result appears, and to "no human data" until a human one does. The rows are in topic order, not strength order.

Topic	Study, year, design	Plant part and preparation	Key finding	What this means
Composition	Foudah et al., 2021, GC-MS plus in vitro assays, Saudi Arabia	Leaf essential oil	46 compounds; main ones 1-decanol (17.85%), decanal (11.04%), trans-2-dodecen-1-ol (7.87%)	Leaf oil is an aldehyde and alcohol profile, one batch from one place
Composition	Veras et al., 2026, scoping review of 30 studies	Seed, fruit, flower and leaf oils compared	Linalool dominates seed, fruit and flower oils; 1-decanol, decanal and 2E-decenol dominate leaf	Seed and leaf oils are chemically different products; see how to read a GC-MS report
Composition	Al-Khayri et al., 2023, narrative review	Seed and leaf oils	Composition varies across germplasm, growth stage and region	One paper's percentages are not a spec for any other bottle
Antibacterial	Delaquis et al., 2002, MIC tests on oils and fractions	Cilantro (leaf) and coriander (seed)	Cilantro oil especially effective against Listeria monocytogenes	A lab result on a medium; see the antibacterial post
Antibacterial	Silva et al., 2011, flow cytometry	"Coriander oil" (part not stated in abstract)	Active against all bacteria tested; membrane damage proposed	A lab result; mechanism proposed, not shown in a body
Antibacterial	Talebi et al., 2024, agar well diffusion, 9 populations	Seed oil	Growth inhibited only at 100% concentration	Weak at dilution, a lab result
Antibacterial	Farias et al., 2025, systematic review: 1,374 records, 7 included	Coriander oil	Activity against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria of food origin	Seven in vitro-type studies; the review does not extend to use
Antifungal	Barbosa et al., 2023, MIC/MFC on 11 Candida strains	Leaf oil	MIC and MFC 31.25 to 250 micrograms per mL; 70% biofilm reduction at 80 mg/mL	A lab result; the biofilm dose is about 4 times the shop page's 2% skin ceiling; see antifungal post
Antifungal	Hiengrach et al., 2026, mouse macrophage cell line	Leaf oil, 0 to 50 micrograms per mL	Greater NF-kB gene expression and macrophage response to Candida albicans	Cells, not animals; a hypothesis-generating result
Antioxidant	Foudah et al., 2021 (DPPH, ferric chloride assays)	Leaf oil	Low antioxidant effect, seen only at high concentration	Chemical assays, no biology
Antioxidant	Nouioura et al., 2024 (five assays)	Linalool-rich oil (59.04%), part not stated	Described as a superior antioxidant profile	Disagrees with Foudah; see below
Nervous system, pain, inflammation	Rojas-Armas et al., 2025, mice and rats	Peruvian seed oil, 59.80% linalool	At 200 mg/kg: seizure latency up to 87.20% longer, seizure frequency about 43% lower; paw edema 51.35% lower at 4 h	Animal data on seed oil; not a leaf oil, not a human result
Pest control	Zhang et al., 2025, tick bioassays	Coriander essential oil	Contact acaricidal activity at 0.344 mg/L; in tick control trials overall efficiency 34.9% for the oil versus 87.0% for alpha-pinene	Ticks on a bench, not on a pet or a person
Crop protection	Raveau et al., 2022, in vitro	Seed oil and aerial-part oil	IC50 0.46 to 2.08 g/L against two plant pathogenic fungi; aerial-part oil strongest	Agriculture, not people
Food	Kačániová et al., 2020, biofilms and vapour phase	Linalool-rich oil (66.07%)	Vapour phase MID50 367.19 microlitres per litre of air against Penicillium expansum at 14 days	A growth-medium result; see the food post

Where the sources disagree

Two papers on the antioxidant question point opposite ways. Foudah et al. (2021) found a leaf oil with low antioxidant effects, while Nouioura et al. (2024) reported a superior profile for a linalool-rich oil. Rojas-Armas et al. (2025) reported a seed oil's ABTS IC50 as 32.04 micrograms per mL, stronger than pure linalool's 152.29. Reasoning from the three together, the likely explanation is plant part and chemistry (aldehyde-rich leaf versus linalool-rich seed), not an error, but none of the abstracts tests that explanation directly. It also shows why "coriander oil is an antioxidant" is not a statement you can attach to our leaf oil.

What is missing, and why it matters for the shop

Nothing in the title searches for anxiety, sleep, memory, trial or volunteers returned a trial of coriander or cilantro essential oil in people. Reasoning from that, any page that lists human benefits for cilantro leaf oil is leaning on seed oil, extract or animal work. We sell the leaf oil undiluted, for its green, citrusy aroma and fragrance uses, and our pages make no medical claims. The study table also shows a size problem: the 200 mg/kg animal dose multiplied by a 70 kg body is 14 g, a quantity nobody should take from a bottle, and mouse-to-human conversion is not linear, so I would not scale it. For skin use our shop page lists 0.5% to 2% in a carrier, with a patch test first, and for anything medical the person to see is a physician or pharmacist. Questions about what to expect from an oil's aroma and uses are in our benefits post.