New Online Retailers Offer Posh CBD Products — But Are They Good?
Looking beautiful and keeping healthy skin has just become much easier with CBD beauty products. Image Credit: By Becky Starsmore on shutterstock
The beauty and CBD industries seem like a match made in heaven, at least if you’re an cannabis-friendly entrepreneur.
New lines of CBD-infused productsseem to appear every week — like Fleur Marché, the “cannabis apothecary” founded by two veterans of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop , which sells $110 CBD tinctures to help you sleep better. Other brands, like Standard Dose, are seeking to position themselves as curators of the finest CBD products available, like $125 sleeping masks and $45 bottles of olive oil.
But with such steep price tags, potential buyers have a big question to answer: are these products worth the money?
Because the CBD industry is still very much in its infancy, there’s still little consistency when it comes to regulating products and setting standards for their production. Consumers are left in something of a grey area when it comes to understanding what it is that they’re buying. Although you may wonder how anyone can know how to tell if a CBD product is any good before they buy it, in reality you can make a more informed decision by asking yourself a few simple questions.
For example, do you want a more affordable CBD oil which may have been grown using pesticides, or are you willing to fork over more money to go to go organic? Similarly, would you like a product with a high concentration of CBD, or would you prefer to start off with a lower dosage? These are all important questions to ask, and they matter a lot more than the packaging.
Product Stanrds and Quality of CBD
The 2018 Farm Bill made it legal to manufacture and sell hemp-based products throughout the United States. This has led to a massive rise in the availability of hemp-derived CBD oil. With products containing the oil cropping up in even the most unexpected places, many customers are buying into the trend and purchasing CBD products without paying the necessary attention to product quality.
Some dispensaries are seeking to address this issue by only selling products that satisfy certain standard, and marketing themselves as stockists of high quality CBD. The general rule of thumb when looking for such products is to only buy those that have been third party laboratory tested. This means that the product has been tested independently, and that the results of the test are reliable.
It’s also worth researching where the hemp itself was grown, as the plant is a bioaccumulator that can absorb heavy metals and other toxins when grown in polluted environments. Since much of the world’s hemp is grown in China, this can be an especially important thing to consider.
Both at home and abroad, one of the biggest criticisms of CBD products to date is the lack of regulation. This is set to change drastically in the next few years as international attitudes toward cannabis become more relaxed, and more American states legalize both medical and recreational cannabis. Many observers hope that future CBD regulations will address the disparity in quality currently affecting the industry, and that customers will find it easier to trust they’re getting their money’s worth for the products they buy.
