There is a huge amount of Potions mentioned, used and created throughout the Harry Potter series. From inducing a Dreamless Sleep to achieving anything you set out to do, there is a Potion which can help you in your quest. There is only one known law pertaining to Potion making in the Wizarding World and that is Golpalott’s Third Law which states that the antidote for a blended poison will be equal to more than the sum of the antidotes for each of the separate components.
Below is a list of all known Potions in the Harry Potter universe, the ingredients and what they can be used for.
Effects: Causes the drinker to prematurely age, the amount drunk effects how much the person will age.
Additional Details:Used unsuccessfully by Fred and George Weasley to overcome Dumbledore’s Age Line and enter their names in the Goblet of Fire.
Appearance Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effects: The strongest known Love Potion. Though it does not create love, just a powerful obsession and infatuation.
Additional Details: It was brewed by Professor Slughorn in his first Potions class with Harry’s year. The smell of the potion differs between people depending on what attracts them. The power of any Love Potion is increased by it’s age.
Appearance: Mother of pearl sheen and steam rising in characteristic spirals.
Ingredients: Unknown
Effects: Causes the drinker to “babble” nonsense.
Additional Details: When Harry Potter tried to alert Severus Snape in a cryptic message about the fate of Sirius Black, Snape pretended to not understand and commented that he would use this potion if he wanted nonsense shouted at him.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Is advertised to increase the drinkers mental agility, concentration and wakefulness
Additional Details: Eddie Carmichael attempted to sell this to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley just before their OWLs, claiming it to be solely responsible for his nine “Outstanding” grades the previous year.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effects: Induces recklessness and hot headedness
Additional Details: Harry Potter is reading up on this potion but cannot concentrate on the text due to thoughts about his connection with Lord Voldemort and the newly formed Dumbledore’s Army
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Scurvy grass, lovage, sneezzwort.
Effects: Replaces the blood supply of one who has lost a large amount of blood.
Additional Details: Arthur Weasley has to take this potion every hour after being bitten by Nagini.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effects: Cures boils.
Additional Details: Little is known about this potion, though it is elementary as it is taught to first years.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Dried nettles, crushed snake fangs, stewed horned slugs, porcupine quills.
Effect: Used to sooth the nerves of the drinker after they have suffered a shock, trauma or emotional outburst.
Additional Details: Administered to Hannah Abbot in her fifth year after she broke down in tears in a Herbology class and claimed to be to stupid to take her exams.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Causes confusion in the drinker.
Additional Details: Harry Potter had to brew this for his third year Potions exam but was unable to get it to thicken as required. He thought he saw Professor Snape give him a zero.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Causes confusion in the drinker
Additional Details: Usually grouped together with the “Befuddlement Draught”.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Lovage, scurvy grass, sneezzwort
Effect: Will shrink whatever it touches.
Additional Details: The antidote to the Swelling Solution.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Temporarily knocks a Doxy unconscious so they can be disposed of.
Additional Details: Used by Mrs Weasley to rid 12 Grimmauld Place of a Doxy infestation.
Appearance: Black in colour
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Relieves the injuries inflicted by thoughts.
Additional Details: Ron Weasley was given this potion after being injured by the brains in the Department of Mysteries.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: The most powerful sleeping potion, it sends the drinker into such a deep sleep that it mimics the state of death.
Additional Details: This is likely the potion Juliet Capulet used in the muggle story of Romeo and Juliet. This Potion needs to be brewed for the NEWT exams.
Appearance: Smooth, blackcurrant-colored liquid at the halfway stage; it should then turn a light shade of lilac, then clear as water, after you stir the potion counterclockwise seven times.
Ingredients: Wormwood, asphodel, valerian roots, and a single sopophorous bean.
Effect: Relieves anxiety and agitation
Additional Details: Extremely complicated to make and the consequences of any mistakes can be dire. It was the first potion that Severus Snape assigned to his fifth year class.
Appearance: Emits a silvery vapour
Ingredients: Moonstone, syrup of hellebore.
Effects: Creates a feeling of euphoria in the drinker.
Additional Details: Side effects of excessive singing and nose-tweaking can be countered by a spring of peppermint. Harry created this potion in his sixth year while most of the class were taking their Apparition exam.
Appearance: Sunshine yellow in colour
Ingredients: Spring of peppermint
Effect: Grants the drinker extended life
Additional Details: It does not make the drinker immortal, only extends their life for as long as they continue to drink the potion.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Derived from the Philosophers Stone.
Effect: Induces fear, delirium and extreme thirst.
Additional Details: Can cause death if left untreated, effects could also include the drinker to relive their most painful memories. Lord Voldemort used this potion to protect Slytherin’s Locket within the Horcrux Cave.
Appearance: Emerald green in colour, emits a phosphorescent glow.
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Unknown, though assumed to either never run out or to cause permanent effects.
Additional Details: Harry studied these in his sixth year.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: “Liquid Luck”. Makes the drinker lucky in whatever they aspire, length of luck is determined of how much is drunk.
Additional Details: Is incredibly hard to brew, and dangerous if too much is consumed, indeed toxic in large quantities. Harry won a small bottle, enough for 24 hours of luck, for creating the “Draught of Living Death” first out of the class, Harry uses it to retrieve Slughorns memory and in the battle against the Death Eaters in his sixth year. It is banned in all competitions.
Appearance: Colour of molten gold, with large drops leaping like goldfish above the surface.
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Causes the drinker to become forgetful
Additional Details: First years had to brew this for their exams.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Unknown, presumably makes the drinker excited or makes their hair stand on end.
Additional Details: Harry Potter and Ron Weasley had to complete an assignment on this in their second tear.
Appearance:Unknown
Ingredients: Rat tails.
Effect: Causes hiccoughs in the drinker
Additional Details: This was brewed by Draco Malfoy when Professor Slughorn asked them to create “something amusing”. Professor Slughorn graded his work as “passable”.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Boosts the drinkers energy
Additional Details: Harry Potter had to brew this during his fifth year exams. He felt he scored an “E” but broke the vial before he reached Professor Snape so received a zero.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Restores those who have been Petrified or paralyzed to their original state.
Additional Details: The Mandrake roots have to have matured past the stage of adolescence. This potion came in very useful in Harry’s 2nd year, when multiple students were Petrified due to the Basilisk.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Matured Mandrakes
Effect: Cures the symptoms of a cold or flu.
Additional Details: A side effect is causing steam to come out of the drinker’s ears for several hours after it is consumed.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Causes the people in the photos to move when developed.
Additional Details: Colin Creevey was excited to learn of this potion in Harry’s second year.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Allows the drinker to take on the form of another person for one hour.
Additional Details: A very complicated potion brewed by Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley and Harry Potter in their second year so that they could sneak into the Slytherin common room. It was also used as a decoy for the Order of the Phoenix to get Harry safely out of his Aunt and Uncle’s House, as well as to break into Gringott’s bank. Barty Crouch Jr also used this potion to imitate Mad Eye Moody in Harry’s fourth year.
Appearance: The appearance changes depending on who the Potion is intended to be turned into. Hermione Granger remarks that Harry Potter “looks much tastier” then Crabbe or Goyle.
Ingredients: Lacewing flies, antimony, leeches, fluxweed, sal ammoniac, knotgrass, powered horn of bicorn, shredded skin of boomslang, filings and rasplings of Salpeter, Mercury and Mars, piece of the person of the person to be transfigured into.
Effect: Unknown
Additional Details: A witch who took a Kwickspell course, wrote a letter of praise to the company stating that the course improved her Potion making skills to such an extent that now all her friends wished to know the secret of her Scintillation Solution.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Causes the drinker to shrink in size.
Additional Details: It also appears to decrease the apparent age of the drinker, as when Snape tested Neville Longbottom’s potion on his pet toad, it turned into a tadpole.
Appearance: Bright green in colour
Ingredients: Minced daisy roots, peeled shrivelfigs, sliced caterpillars, rat spleen, leech juice.
Effect: Causes vanished or otherwise lost bones to regrow.
Additional Details: The potion apparently tastes horrible, as attested to by Harry Potter when he had to take in in his second year after having his bones vanished by Professor Lockheart. Fleur Delacour Weasley also administered Skele-gro to Griphook the Goblin after his escape from Malfoy Manor.
Appearance: Comes in a large bottle and smokes when it is dispensed.
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Used to style hair and presumably make it sleeker and straight.
Additional Notes: Hermione used this to tame her hair for the Yule Ball
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Causes the drinker to fall into a deep sleep
Additional Details: Though a sleeping potion it is much less powerful then the Draught of the Living Dead and is described by Hermione Granger as “simple”. It is used on Crabbe and Goyle in their second year and on the four dragons needed for the first task in their fourth year.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Increases the strength of the drinker.
Additional Notes: Professor Snape had his fifth year Potions class brew this when his lesson was being observed by Professor Umbridge. She did not like the idea of the students learning such a potion, adding that the Ministry thought it best to not be on the curriculum.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Salamander blood.
Effect: Causes whatever it touches to swell up in size.
Additional Details: Harry’s class were brewing this potion in their second year when Harry, Ron and Hermione planned to steal ingredients from Snape’s store supply for their Polyjuice potion. Harry’s distraction, a firework, landed in a students cauldron and caused the potion to splash out and hit random students who had to go to Snape for a Deflating Draught.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Puffer fish eyes.
Effect: Forces the drinker to answer any question addressed to them truthfully.
Additional Details: It is a very powerful truth serum, only 3 drops are needed for the drinker to spill out their innermost secrets. It can be resisted through means such as Occlumency and is very difficult to make. It is commonly used during interrogations, such as the one of Barty Crouch Jr in Harry’s fourth year. Umbridge attempted to use it against Harry Potter in his fifth year but was unsuccessful, either because Snape provided her with a fake potion or because Harry only pretending to drink it.
Appearance: Odourless and colourless it is almost impossible to distinguish it from water.
Ingredients: Unknown
Effect: Allows the drinker to think more clearly
Additional Notes: Harry’s potions class was asked to create this in their fourth year.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Ground scarab beetles, cut ginger roots, armadillo bile.
Effect: Relieves the symptoms of lyncanthrophy, allows the drinker to retain their human mind, actions and senses while they convert to Werewolf form.
Additional Details: A complicated recipe and the potion must be consumed once a day in the week leading up to the full moon. The potion was invented by Damocles after 1970 as the potion was not available to Remus Lupin when he was a child.
Appearance: Smokes faintly.
Ingredients: Wolfsbane
Effect: A line of love potions. They do not induce love but instead create a powerful obsession and infatuation.
Additional Notes: This is a line of different love potions created by Fred and George Weasley and sold at their joke shop, Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes.
Appearance: Unknown
Ingredients: Unknown
