Spoiled for CHOICE

With the global CBD skincare market booming, now is the ideal time to work the antiinflammatory ingredient into your spa treatment menu, but with so much choice out there, how do you pick the right brand to partner with? I spent a lot of time looking for the right company to collaborate with at The Spa at Blythswood Square in Glasgow because I didn’t want to simply add CBD to our existing product range, or ask guests to ingest a tincture prior to a treatment and label it as a CBD spa day. I wanted to create something authentic.

How to find a reputable brand

Before choosing a brand to collaborate with, you need to research the sector because there are so many different suppliers of CBD on the market and they range in quality.

For example, strength for oral tinctures really has to start at 5% (500mg in a 10ml bottle) because anything below that will not carry enough CBD to have any real benefit.

The range you carry in your spa should also be organic, based in hemp or MCT (medium-chain triglycerides) oil, and be grown from European certified seeds. Extraction methods also deem whether a product is premium or not.

For topical application, 1% CBD content or more is strong. Any lower than this and it won’t be bioavailable to have any therapeutic effect.

At Blythswood Square, we use a 1% homecare range, which is strong and sustainable, plus a super-boosted and potent 5% (1,500mg of CBD) professional range.

The questions you need to ask

You also want a laboratory-grade CBD oil from a company that has done independent testing on their products. CBD oil is still undergoing a lot of testing to ascertain its benefits so it’s currently considered a supplement.

When meeting with CBD-infused skincare brands, ask these key questions:

• Is the CBD pharmaceutical grade?

• Does the company do lab testing?

• Do they have independent tests completed and available to review?

• Where do they source their raw materials?

• Do they have a good reputation, with customer reviews available?

• Is the range free from THC (tetrahydrocannabinol)?

In the end, we partnered with Hashtag Organics, which has a CBD-infused skincare range La Rue Verte – the only Cibtac-accredited CBD product house in the industry. Hashtag Organics provides an organic, laboratory-grade range of CBD oil with three years’ experience, so it seemed an excellent partner choice.

CBD BEAUTY IN NUMBERS

£741m what the global CBD skincare market is forecaste to be worth by 2024

*Prohibition Partners Impact Series: Disrupting Beauty Report

11% of UK adults have tried a CBD product

*YouGov

48% of the UK population is still not convinced about CBD’s effectiveness

*Google

The truth about CBD skincare

Your spa team must be aware of the advice they are giving to clients on the benefits of using CBD-infused beauty products. They can’t make claims of any medical benefits as that is still being researched.

For your therapists to feel truly comfortable talking about CBD, they needed to master the treatment protocols as well as further their understanding of the endocannabinoid system. This will allow your team to best communicate to the client how CBD biologically works and it will also give therapists a method of explaining the benefits of the ingredient without making medical claims.

What you can say is that the ingredient can help the skin because it is anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and anti-ageing. CBD acts on the endocannabinoid system, the body’s innate balancing mechanism, which is made up of a series of receptors sited throughout the brain and central nervous system.

It is responsible for regulating mood, sleep, pain, inflammation, appetite, memory and fertility.

These receptors are called CB1 and CB2.

However, we also have CB1 and CB2 receptors sited throughout the epidermis. CBD acts on these receptors to affect the immune cells for inflammation, working on sensory nerves to inhibit the sensation of itch (the most common diagnosed symptom in dermatology practice), and acting as an antioxidant on the skin.

CBD provides the missing particle for a free-radical to bond with, stopping it going on to cause DNA damage.

We know that inflammation and oxidative stress go hand in hand with ageing, so this offers a layered approach.

CBD treatments fit well in the wellness market and I’ve had great success with creating full experiences centred around the treatments, including thermal journeys, guided meditation and CBD post-treatment beverages.

PB

Finlay Anderson is spa director at The Spa at Blythswood Square in Glasgow, Scotland, which offers a range of CBD treatments.