An app that tracks your meals and your menstrual cycle together

What does “together” actually mean?

Most apps that mention both are one thing with the other bolted on: a calorie counter with a period calendar, or a cycle tracker with a page of nutrition tips. What “together” means in Luminelle is narrower and more useful. The phase is a field on the meal. When you log a plate on day three of your cycle, the entry is saved as a menstrual-phase meal, permanently. The same is true of a product you scan, a selfie you take and a journal note you write. Nothing has to be cross-referenced later, because the two facts were never stored apart.

That is the whole trick. Once every entry knows which phase it belongs to, “does what I eat in the week before my period line up with how my skin behaves?” stops being a question for a general article and becomes a question about your own data.

How does the meal side work?

Point the camera at the plate. Luminelle names the dish, estimates calories and grams of protein, carbohydrate and fat, keeps the photo on your phone and adds the meal to a daily ring. For packaged food you scan the barcode instead and get the label’s own numbers, plus the Nutri-Score and the NOVA processing group where the product carries them.

There is no goal unless you set one, and nothing breaks if you skip a day. The ring resets at midnight. On the free tier, barcode scans are unlimited and photo scans, of a plate, a food label or a cosmetic ingredient list, are capped at five a day.

How does the cycle side work?

Enter the first day of your last period, your usual cycle length and how long your period lasts. From that, Luminelle works out the day you are on and names the phase: menstrual, follicular, ovulatory or luteal. The boundaries follow the flexible model in the WomanCode cycle guide rather than a fixed 28-day template. The luteal phase is held at 13 days, counted back from the expected start of the next period; the ovulatory window is three days, or four for cycles of 32 days and longer; the menstrual phase is as long as your period actually is; and the follicular phase absorbs whatever is left.

Each time you log a new period the app keeps the date. Once it has two completed cycles it refines your cycle length from a rolling average of the last three, and until it has three completed cycles the phase is labelled as estimated, because it is. If a period is late, the app holds at late luteal and says so, rather than inventing a new cycle you have not had.

The phase is then stamped on everything: every meal, every product scan, every selfie, every journal entry.

What does it do with the two?

Two things happen with the pairing, one immediate and one slow.

Immediately, each phase comes with a daily note on what your body is doing and which foods tend to help, drawn from the WomanCode cycle guide and cross-checked against Cleveland Clinic, ACOG and NIH material. In the menstrual phase that means iron and omega-3s; in the luteal phase, magnesium, complex carbohydrates and less caffeine as PMS approaches. When you log a plate, the foods on it are compared with that phase’s list and the match is saved with the meal. It is a suggestion, not a diet plan.

Slowly, a correlation pass runs once a night over the last 90 days of your entries. It asks a fixed set of statistical questions: whether the days you ate phase-matched foods look different, one or two days later, from the days you did not; whether a journal symptom such as breakouts or redness differs by phase; whether the redness, breakouts or dryness read from your selfies track the phase. A result only appears once there is enough data behind it, the pass writes at most four new observations per run so the app never fishes for a story, and each one is shown with how strong the evidence is. These Patterns are the paid part of the app; the logging and the cycle tracking are free.

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not show a fertile window, and it is not contraception. The app estimates a phase and an expected period date from the dates you give it; it does not tell you when you can or cannot conceive.
• It does not diagnose. PCOS, endometriosis, PMDD and irregular cycles are things to take to a clinician. Luminelle accepts cycle lengths from 14 to 60 days and copes with a late period, but it will not tell you why.
• It does not put food on trial. No ingredient flags on meals, no good and bad foods, no streaks.
• It does not need a calorie goal. Set one if you want one.

How does it compare with a cycle app or a calorie app?

The dedicated apps do their one thing better, and it is worth saying so before the table. Clue and Flo track a cycle in far more detail than Luminelle does. MyFitnessPal’s food database is far larger. MyFLO gives phase-based food guidance in more depth. What none of them do is save the phase on the meal you actually ate, next to the products you actually used.

If what you want is the best cycle tracker, Clue or Flo is the better tool, and if you want the biggest food database, MyFitnessPal is. Luminelle is the one to pick when the question is the pairing: what you ate, in which phase, next to what your skin did, in one timeline. For the skincare side on its own, the comparison with Yuka and the other scanners is a separate page.

What happens to the data?

Cycle dates, meals and journal entries are stored on servers in the EU. Meal photos stay on your phone: the photo is sent for analysis, the result comes back, and the image is not kept on our side. Sending photos and text to the AI service that reads them needs your consent, asked once, and you can withdraw it in Settings; the app keeps working without those features. There are no ads and your data is not sold. You can delete the account and everything in it from Settings, and it is purged within 30 days. The privacy policy has the full list of what is stored.

Questions people ask