Clove Oil for Bad Breath: Find the Cause Before the Product

Clove has a reputation for freshening breath, and the reputation is the problem: it sends people to a bottle before they know why their breath smells. The causes of persistent bad breath are mostly dental, occasionally medical, and almost never solved by changing the flavor in your mouth. We sell clove bud and clove leaf oil for aroma and cosmetic use, not for the mouth, so this page walks through the causes in the order a dentist would, then says what we found (and did not find) about clove.

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Step 1: where does the smell come from?

The American Dental Association's consumer site, MouthHealthy, puts the cause first: bacteria in the mouth feed on food particles and release foul-smelling waste, and "bad breath that just won't go away or a constant bad taste in your mouth can be a warning sign of advanced gum disease". It also lists dry mouth (from some medications, salivary gland problems or mouth breathing), because less saliva means less rinsing. A 2022 narrative review by Izidoro et al. in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health puts numbers on it: most halitosis is linked to poor oral hygiene, periodontitis and tongue coating, about 10% to ear, nose and throat causes, and about 5% to gastrointestinal or endocrine disorders.

That gives a short ladder, and the products you pick should match the rung:

  1. Food, coffee, garlic, tobacco. Temporary, and a toothbrush and water are the ordinary answer.
  2. Plaque, tongue coating, gum disease. The cause is bacteria that need to be physically removed, and a dentist or hygienist can show where you are missing. MouthHealthy says to see a dentist if you are worried about the cause.
  3. Dry mouth. Ask your dentist or pharmacist whether a medicine you take is involved. MouthHealthy mentions sugar-free gum or candy to get saliva flowing, and artificial saliva if your dentist suggests it.
  4. Sinus, reflux, diabetes and similar. MouthHealthy says that if your mouth is healthy, your dentist may refer you to your primary care doctor, because bad breath with an unclear cause can point to these.

Step 2: what do rinses actually do?

The same ADA page says over-the-counter mouthwashes can act on bacteria or only temporarily cover up odor, and calls them "only a temporary solution", since brushing and flossing still have to remove the food and bacteria causing the problem. That frames everything else here. A flavor or an antimicrobial that is rinsed away in minutes does not change the plaque that regrows.

The best controlled evidence on essential-oil rinses is about gums, not breath, and not about clove. Stoeken, Paraskevas and van der Weijden (Journal of Periodontology, 2007) pooled 11 publications on a finished essential-oil mouthrinse used with daily brushing and reported lower gingivitis and plaque scores than control, with very high heterogeneity (I-squared about 93 to 97%). The abstract does not name the oils. It tells you that a standardized rinse can add to brushing in a research setting. It does not tell you that a bottle of single essential oil does anything.

One more point on the Izidoro figures: they describe where cases come from across a population, so they are a prior, not a verdict on you. Someone with gum bleeding and a coated tongue is probably in the largest group, and someone with a clean mouth and a persistent smell is in the smaller groups that need a physician. A dentist can sort which, and clove oil cannot.

Step 3: what do we know about clove specifically?

Less than the reputation suggests. On 23 October 2026 we ran a title search on Europe PMC for clove or eugenol combined with halitosis, oral malodor or breath, and found no clinical trial of clove oil for bad breath. A search can miss things, so this is "we did not find one", not proof of absence. What does exist is lab work on clove compounds and oral bacteria. For example, Zhang et al. (2017) tested eugenol from clove leaf oil against Porphyromonas gingivalis, a gum-disease bacterium, and reported growth inhibition at 31.25 micromolar and reduced biofilm in dishes. Reasoning from this, the practical consequence is that clove chemistry plausibly interacts with oral bacteria in a tube, but breath is produced in a living mouth full of saliva and a tongue-coating biofilm, and no one we found has tested the oil there.

Whole cloves are a different question from the oil. A clove bud from a spice jar is a dried flower bud, and the oil is the steam-distilled concentrate of it. Our bud oil's published GC-MS report lists 73.57% eugenol, and nothing about chewing a whole spice tells you how that concentrated oil would behave in a mouth. We found no trial on either, so we are not going to say that one follows from the other. For the difference between the spice and the oil see clove oil vs whole cloves.

Why we will not write a clove rinse recipe

Three documented reasons, none of them about being cautious for its own sake:

Our product pages say the oils are for aromatic and cosmetic use only, never internal use. We also do not sell mouthwash or any dental product, and we have not made or tested any rinse.

What we would suggest instead

Clove Essential Oil bottle

Clove Essential Oil

Clove Essential Oil from our own shop, in sizes from 0.5 oz to bulk.

From $10.99

Shop Now →

Sources & Further Reading