Albino Penis Envy: why a nearly white mushroom still turns blue

In December 2007, a breeder named John Workman posted on a mushroom-growing forum about the best version so far of a line he had been breeding since the mid-2000s. He wanted it pure white. The caps kept turning blue. The line became known as Albino Penis Envy, and it poses a plain puzzle: if a mushroom has almost no pigment, why does it still turn blue?

This guide follows the line from that post to the chemistry of blueing and to what genome and laboratory studies do and do not show about white cubensis. It is the written companion to our documentary, Albino Penis Envy: no pigment, so why is it blue?. For the general chemistry of bruising, read why magic mushrooms turn blue.

What does “albino” mean for a mushroom?

In a mushroom, colour lives in two places: the cap and stem, and the spores, which fall from the gills as a fine dust. Growers sort pale cubensis into two groups. A leucistic mushroom is white or off-white but still drops pigmented spores. An albino is white all the way through, with clear, colourless spores.

These are trade terms. We could not find a formal scientific definition for either. Albino Penis Envy is said to drop very few spores, in deposits so faint they are hard to see at all, and growers and sellers describe it the same way. We found no measurement of it.

On paper, then, this is a mushroom with very little to show: a pale cap and pale spores. And yet the descriptions keep mentioning blue.

Where did Albino Penis Envy come from?

The story begins with another white mushroom. In the 1990s a grower who went by Psylocybe Fanaticus, PF for short, kept a cubensis line called PF Classic. Around the year 2000 a white form turned up in it, and it became known as PF Albino. How it arose is disputed. One account blames ultraviolet lamps used near the cultures, but even the man telling that story doubts it: he says the lamps were ordinary black lights, probably too weak to damage DNA. This part rests on the creator’s own published account, which we cite from the film’s research and could not re-open for this page.

People assumed PF Albino made no spores at all. By Workman’s own account, he later looked at its gills under a microscope and found them: colourless spores. Both white lines are real enough to photograph. A 2025 scientific review (Kurzbaum et al.) published pictures of PF Albino and of a line labelled Long Albino Penis Envy.

Workman crossed PF Albino with Penis Envy, the cultivar from our earlier film. He chose two parents that looked nothing alike, so a successful cross would be obvious. The first generation surprised him: the offspring looked like perfectly ordinary cubensis. Only in later generations did the white colour and the Penis Envy shape come back. His explanation is that both traits are recessive, hidden unless a mushroom inherits them from both parents. It fits the pattern, but it has never been tested.

Even the date is fuzzy. Accounts put it at 2006, or at a forum post at the end of 2007. For the older, better-documented history of the Penis Envy name itself, see the Penis Envy mushroom: history and evidence and what genome records show about the name.

Is every Albino Penis Envy the same mushroom?

There is a catch with recessive traits. Spores come from sexual reproduction, and each one carries a fresh shuffle of its parents’ genes, so mushrooms grown from spores can drift. Two with the same name need not be genetic twins. A clone avoids that: copied living tissue carries the same genes as its source.

A genome study (McTaggart et al. 2023) notes that stable looks can be a sign of inbreeding, and its data suggest Penis Envy lines were cloned or self-crossed. For Albino Penis Envy, the paper trail is about spores: its creator says enough spores can be gathered and the line is still passed on through them. So the name may cover a family of siblings rather than a single clone. That is an inference from basic genetics, not a measurement, and how any particular line is kept going in practice is not documented. It may be one reason descriptions differ: pale in one account, tinged blue in another.

Why does a white mushroom still turn blue?

For decades, chemists knew that injured Psilocybe mushrooms turn blue. They did not know how. In 2020, researchers in Jena, Germany, worked out the reaction using Psilocybe cubensis (Lenz et al. 2020).

1. The mushroom stores psilocybin, a molecule with a phosphate group attached. The researchers think that phosphate works like a reversible safety catch.
2. When tissue is crushed or cut, an enzyme called PsiP removes the phosphate, leaving psilocin.
3. A second enzyme, PsiL, oxidises the psilocin.
4. The oxidised units link into chains, from about three to thirteen units long. Those chains are blue.

The team watched the reaction happen inside an NMR spectrometer, tracking it carbon by carbon. There is no single blue molecule: it is a mixture. Specimens can also turn blue on their own as they age. And the genes for the two enzymes do not sit with the psilocybin genes. They are elsewhere in the genome, so the blue machinery is a separate add-on.

That is the likely answer to the puzzle. The blue does not come from the cap’s pigment. It is built on the spot, from psilocin. The infrared spectrum of the blue material shows some similarities to eumelanin, a dark pigment, so a mushroom called albino can still make colour on demand.

Does a bluer mushroom contain more psilocybin?

A white mushroom can turn blue as long as it still has psilocybin to break down. Does this one? In a 2026 study (Sharchaton et al.), researchers grew fourteen named cubensis strains under identical conditions and confirmed every strain’s species with DNA. Albino Penis Envy was one of them. Its sample contained psilocybin and some psilocin too: raw material for blue.

But each strain was grown in a single chamber and measured from one pooled sample. One batch is a data point, not a verdict on every mushroom with the name. The same study found substantial differences between strains and between individual mushrooms of the same strain, even under strict standardisation.

And blue is not a gauge. Blueing shows that psilocin is present and breaking down. No study we found has measured whether a bluer mushroom contains more psilocybin. For why a name cannot stand in for a measurement, see what laboratory studies of potency do and do not establish.

What makes it white? Nobody knows yet

We found no study identifying the gene behind the white, or even the chemistry of the cubensis cap pigment, and no published Albino Penis Envy genome. A 2021 genome atlas (McKernan et al.) includes albino and leucistic samples from several sellers, but none of them is labelled Albino Penis Envy.

A 2023 study (McTaggart et al.) pooled those genomes with more, 124 in all. Its albino and leucistic lines fell into two different populations, though related ones, so white does not trace back to a single population. Those names came from sellers, so even that result carries an asterisk. The authors suggest traits such as colour may have been fixed by self-crossing.

Other mushrooms show how far this kind of science can go. In the button mushroom, a white cap was the key trait chosen during domestication, and it has been linked to a specific gene (Ling et al. 2026). In an oyster mushroom, cap darkness tracks another gene (Zhang et al. 2022). In enoki, the yellow comes from flavonoids switched on or off mainly at one spot in the genome (Lv et al. 2026). For cubensis, that work has not been done.

What is documented, and what is not

How to read the name

“Albino” tells you about pigment. It does not tell you how much psilocybin is inside, or which lineage a mushroom comes from. Pigment is what a mushroom wears; blue is something it does. If you read a sentence that treats the name as a guarantee of strength, origin or colour, it is making a claim the sources we found do not support.

For how other names hold up against the records, see what can and cannot be compared between cubensis names and species, strains, varieties and cultivars. The film also covers the Penis Envy link in its first chapters: watch it with the full transcript.

Shroomverse sells mushroom products. This article is general educational information about mushroom colour, chemistry and genetics. It is not medical, legal or identification advice, contains no growing, sourcing or dosing guidance, and does not recommend any product.