Penis Envy is an informal label within Psilocybe cubensis. GBIF lists it only among the species’ English common names (GBIF). A 2021 data note sequenced dried material it called “strain P.envy” and said plainly that “the strain name is anecdotal” (McKernan et al., 2021).
The public records show how one sample was labelled. In NCBI’s formal strain field that genome is MGC-MH-2018, a lab code, and “Penvy” reached the assembly name only in a February 2022 revision (NCBI assembly record; revision history). A 2025 study lists a sample called “PE” whose short ITS barcode matched P. cubensis (Cohen et al., 2025), which supports the species but cannot show lineage.
Related labels multiply. A 2022 US contest table lists eight entries with “Penis Envy” in the cultivar column, among them Albino Penis Envy (Oakland Hyphae, 2022). That shows how entrants described samples, not that they share a parent. Stories about who first grew it remain undocumented.
Sources
- McKernan et al., 2021, F1000Research data note
- NCBI Datasets: assembly GCF_017499595.1
- Cohen et al., 2025, Scientific Reports (PMC)
- Oakland Hyphae, Fall 2022 Hyphae Cup results (PDF)
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