What is CBD Oil?

What is CBD Oil?

CBD oil is one of the most popular CBD Products on the market due to it’s efficiency for absorption and ease of manufacturing meaning that it has flooded the market, but is it safe to say that all CBD Oils are made the same? No it’s not..

Unfortunately with an unregulated industry such as CBD currently is there are no strict guidelines or accreditation needed to verify these products. You see statements being thrown around for trustability such as ‘Lab Tested’ but even that can be used misleadingly so where do you start when trying to find a suitable product to try?

Well lets start with what to look out for.

 

Confusing Terminology

CBD Oil Drops or CBD Tinctures as they’re often called come in all different strengths and are also described using different methods which only serves to confuse first time customers even more. Having had our retail outlet for almost a year now we have seen first hand how difficult it can be to wrap your head around when starting out, let alone when taking into account the additional things that could be misleading you that we’ll get into shortly.

One confusing point for many of our customers is the different ‘strengths’ of CBD drops. We urge our customers to ignore the strength in terms of how effective it will be to you but more as a cost efficiency metric. Irregardless of the strength you use you can achieve the exact same dosage, it would just mean taking more or less of the oil to achieve your dose. So for example if you took 10mg a day, a 2.5% (250mg) 10ml bottle of CBD would require you to use roughly 8 drops, a 5% (500mg) 10ml bottle would only require you to take 4 drops. So when it comes down to what strength to start with our advice is typically to start with the highest strength that’s within your budget. This way you can take a consistent dose that will be as cost effective for you to trial over an extended period of time, whether that be 2-6 weeks. Most users will know whether CBD is for them after consistently taking it for a minimum of two weeks. Furthermore many have reported that they then only realised how much it was helping day to day when they stopped due to running out or thinking it wasn't working for them and no longer had it in their system. 

Percentage:

A lot of CBD oil’s will state a % on the front of the bottle either alongside a MG (Milligram) amount or by itself. The problem with this way of determining strength is it’s hard to quantity the value of the product within without knowing other factors such as bottle size. When most people will take 10-25mg per dose it’s much easier to be able to work out how long a bottle will last you by running simple division based off of total CBD content vs the % within a bottle. After all if it states  5% in a 10ml bottle vs 5% in a 30ml bottle will result in wildly different total CBD content. 

MG Count:

As stated above this is the easiest and most straight forward way to work out the cost to yourself. As mentioned above we find with our customers most will take 10-25mg twice a day. Lets round that off to an easy number and say that they consume 25mg total a day. If they bought a 500mg bottle of CBD Oil they can easily work out that they would get 20 days worth out of a bottle. So a £29.99 500mg bottle such as ours works out at £1.49 a day. Should the same person then buy the 1,000mg bottle next time, that would last them 40 days results in the daily cost of £1.24.

 

Misleading Terminology

Now if you’ve managed to wrap your head around the above be prepared for this to get way more complicated. We have been retailers for a while now as alongside producing our own brand. We pride ourselves on providing peace of mind at retail by verifying the lab reports and only selling products that you can trust. In this process we have come across a lot of misleading info on labels. Whether it’s intentional or not is not for us to say and this isn’t to say that brands that label things this way can’t be trusted as with this understanding you can still utilise their products efficiently in some cases. Anyway lets get to it.

The dosages we proposed above are in mg or ‘Milligram’ what that refers to is the weight of the active CBD. As a point of reference 1,000mg = 1 gram, so if you buy a bottle of our 1,000mg CBD oil then that will have at least 1g of actual CBD in the bottle. If you buy our 300mg Natures Balm that has .3g of CBD content in it and so on. 

So lets get to the confusing part. CBD comes in these three main varieties, Full Spectrum Extract, Broad Spectrum Extract and Isolate. These all come in varying strengths and cannabinoid profiles. The only way to verify exactly how much CBD is in any of these is via a lab report. You can average things if doing the same extraction processes with the same crop/ strain etc over and over but even then there will be variables based off of the nutrients the plants had, light levels or stresses during growing that means you would still need to do a lab test to ascertain the actual CBD content.

As an example of a standard Full Spectrum Extract you will typically find distillate that has levels ranging from 30-90% CBD content with additional cannabinoids bringing the overall potency to a higher level. We get these lab tested and made to fit our formulas such as the 10% in Olive Oil that we use for our 1,000mg CBD Drops. That means that there is roughly 100mg of CBD in every 1g of the extract. This is where some labels we’ve come across are misleading to the uninformed. Technically that 1g of 10% CBD extract has 100mg of CBD in it but in total is technically 1,000mg of CBD extract. What you as an end user needs to know is the actual active CBD content not the total amount of extract in there. So for our 1,000mg tincture we use 10g of our 10% CBD extract that equates to 1,000mg of actual CBD, however if we were to use the same misleading label practice that we’ve seen elsewhere we would claim that that bottle has 10,000mg of CBD in! As much as this is is an exaggerated example we have seen many cases where we have had irate customers come in saying we over charge because they bought a 3,000mg tincture for £39.99 only to find out with some digging that they had actually bought a bottle 600mg active CBD in with a total of 3 grams (3,000mg) of CBD extract in which was mainly the carrier oil and a handful of other cannibanoids. 

Another product we regularly see these issues in are CBD Pastes. We’ll see a product stating its 60% CBD in a 1ml syringe. This should mean that there is 600mg active CBD in the syringe however we regularly find that the active CBD is around 450mg and the other 150mg is from the other cannabinoids found in the plant. Don’t get us wrong the other cannabinoids are vital to a good full spectrum extract, however in our eyes the dosage stated should be the CBD as claimed with the additional cannabinoids being on top of that figure. As an example on a recent lab test done on our 1000mg 10ml CBD oil drops we found it to have 1.2% of CBG, .5% CBN and similar levels of other cannabinoids on top of the 1,000mg CBD promised in each bottle.

Not only have we seen this practice used by retailers selling to consumers but we also see it by industry leading suppliers. You request to purchase a kilo of 50% CBD Distillate, but when we get it lab tested its regularly under at around 40% with the extra 10% being made up of other cannabinoids.

Perhaps we’re idiots for not doing it this way as clearly a lot of other companies are doing it and making a lot of money from it, but for us it’s about honesty and transparency. We’ve had so many interactions with people who have tried CBD and would never have tried it again because they were ill advised or mislead by the label and taking minuscule dosages with no results. When we work in an industry that is unregulated and full of issues such as those mentioned above we morally feel as though we need to help those who could benefit from CBD learn what they need to look out for.

As always we are on hand to answer questions or give advice whether you buy from us or not. CBD is an incredible natural product and the differences we’ve experienced and seen in others after utilising it are incredible.

With such a fragile industry it’s vital that as an industry we are honest, open and supportive. How many people who could have benefitted from CBD been put off it from being mis sold or mislead with labels?

For a more in-depth breakdown on what CBD is and how it helps people, Green Box (One of our resellers!) have created this fantastic compendium which compiles many hours of research trawling through government docs, clinical trials, and it's been verified by a Cannabinoids expert on their Advisory Board too. Check it out HERE!

 

- The Infinity CBD Team