CH 02 Morphology Updated
What Penis Envy and Albino Penis Envy look like
The build that defines Penis Envy and Albino Penis Envy: thick dense stems, small caps that stay closed, pale or white flesh, and blue bruising.
- Stem
- thick, dense, firm
- Cap
- small, often stays closed
- APE colour
- white to cream, leucistic
- Genome sequenced
- 46.6 Mb (2021)
Penis Envy is recognised by its build: a thick, dense stem that is wide in proportion to its length, topped by a small, rounded cap that often stays closed or opens late. Albino Penis Envy (APE) has the same build with little or no pigment, so its fruiting bodies are white to cream. Shape is the one feature that defines this cultivar, which is also where its name comes from.
Below, each feature is listed with where the description comes from. No formal botanical description of the cultivar exists, so the sources are a scientific review, photographs in research papers, grower accounts and shop strain cards.
The stem
The stem is the part that sets Penis Envy apart from most cubensis cultures. Shop and grower descriptions agree on a stem that is thick, firm and dense. Dutch-Smart's strain card for its APE grow bag lists "white to cream-coloured fruits with thick stems" and calls the line "thick, compact" (shop description). The 2025 review of cubensis strains names Penis Envy for its "distinct morphological characteristics" without describing them further (Kurzbaum et al., 2025). Its Figure 1 shows a Penis Envy 7 fruiting body and a 'Long Albino Penis Envy', both with heavy stems.
For comparison, the species description for wild P. cubensis gives a hollow stem of 20 to 80 mm with a cap of 16 to 80 mm across, which flattens with age (Kurzbaum et al., 2025, after Singer and Smith).
The cap and the veil
In typical cubensis the cap opens and tears the partial veil, the thin membrane between cap edge and stem, which leaves a ring and exposes the gills so that spores can drop. In Penis Envy the cap stays small and often stays closed. The F1000Research reviewers of the 2021 genome paper repeated the grower account of the original mutant as a fruiting body with "a pale cap and missing partial veil" (McKernan et al., 2021). The shop card for APE says "the caps stay small and often relatively closed".
The closed cap is the reason Penis Envy is said to produce few spores. The growing page explains what that means for cultivation.
Albino and leucistic forms
APE lacks most of the brown pigment of the line. Dutch-Smart's description says that "many specimens are leucistic rather than fully albino", meaning they keep some pigment, so colour can range from white to cream or light grey. The 2025 review uses the same term, "white, leucistic fruiting bodies", for a different albino line, Albino A+.
Colour is cosmetic as far as anyone has measured. In the one study that tested both under identical conditions, APE contained less in total than the pigmented Penis Envy (12.33 against 17.59 mg/g dry weight), so pale does not mean stronger (Sharchaton et al., 2026). The lab data set out the full numbers.
Blue bruising
Like all psilocybin mushrooms, Penis Envy turns blue where it is handled or damaged. Biochemists have shown that this comes from psilocin being released and oxidised into blue chains of 3 to 13 linked molecules (Lenz et al., 2020). On white APE flesh the bruising stands out more. It is a normal reaction, and the shop card for APE says the same: "an ordinary bruising reaction and not contamination".
What the genome shows
In 2021 a genomics company in Massachusetts published a long-read genome assembly from dried stems of a culture labelled "P.envy": 46.6 megabases in 32 contigs, 13,478 annotated genes. They noted a 4.6 kb insertion in the gene for the enzyme that adds methyl groups during psilocybin synthesis, not seen in earlier cubensis data, and wrote that "further work is required to understand the biological significance" (McKernan et al., 2021). One reviewer suggested the insertion could be an artefact of fungi carrying several nuclei per cell. Nobody has yet linked a gene to the thick stem or the closed cap.
Look-alikes in the shop
Several newer cultures are sold as members of the Penis Envy family. Dutch-Smart describes Bluey Vuitton as a cross of Panama and "the Melmak branch of the Penis Envy family", with "dense, firm fruit bodies and thick stems", and Jack Frost as a cross of Albino Penis Envy and True Albino Teacher. Those lineages are the shop's and breeder's descriptions; no genetic comparison has been published.
Quick reference
| Feature | Penis Envy | Albino Penis Envy | Typical cubensis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stem | thick, dense | thick, dense | slender, hollow, 20 to 80 mm |
| Cap | small, often closed | small, often closed | opens and flattens |
| Colour | pigmented | white to cream | white to ochre-brown cap |
| Spore drop | low (reported) | low (reported) | heavy, purple-black print |
| Measured total, one study | 17.59 mg/g | 12.33 mg/g | 2.62 to 20.65 mg/g across 14 strains |