Indica calms you down, sativa lifts you up: the most repeated rule in cannabis, and the least reliable. The labels describe what a plant looked like in a field decades ago. What you feel tonight is chemistry, and the chemistry is printed on the certificate.
Where the labels came from
Indica and sativa began as botany. Sativa described tall, narrow leafed plants from equatorial regions with long flowering times; indica described short, broad leafed plants from the mountain belts of central Asia that finished fast and grew dense. For growers those categories still matter, because they predict how a plant behaves in cultivation. For what a flower feels like, they were always a loose proxy at best.
Why the proxy broke
A century of crossbreeding means virtually everything sold today is a hybrid many generations deep. Lineages have been folded into each other so thoroughly that a plant's silhouette no longer predicts its profile. Laboratory surveys keep finding indica labeled and sativa labeled cultivars with chemically indistinguishable fingerprints. The name on the menu is marketing inheritance. The terpene table is measurement.
What to read instead
Two numbers and a list. First, total potency, which sets volume, explained in the THCA vs THC file. Second, total terpene content, which sets how vivid the character is. Third, the top three terpenes, which set the direction: myrcene and linalool lean evening, limonene and terpinolene lean bright, beta caryophyllene settles the body, and pinene clears the air.
Where the house stands
Release pages here still note classification, because patrons ask and tradition has its place. But every release is bought, tested, and described by its actual chemistry, and the effect index is built from profiles rather than plant shapes. When the label and the table disagree, believe the table.
Translation guide: when a menu says indica, read it as probably myrcene heavy. When it says sativa, read it as probably terpinolene or limonene forward. Then check whether that guess is actually true on the certificate.
The full method for judging a jar lives in the buying standard, and every certificate is published in the certification library.