As 2023 comes to a close, Allure dives into those moments when beauty took center stage this year: the trends, the people, and the technologies that filled our feeds and captured our imaginations. As always, we're here to chronicle, to celebrate, and to make sense of it all — or at least try. Welcome to the Year in Beauty.
Claudia Mata didn’t set out to become the founder of a CBD skin-care brand, but she became one, in 2017, when she traveled to New York City to introduce the beauty media to her new line of small-batch, plant-based lip balm. After editors learned that the formula contained CBD, a.k.a. cannabidiol, says Mata, the ingredient suddenly became the focus of every conversation. "I’d be like, ‘And it’s made fresh every week!’ They’d be like, 'So, anyway, [about that CBD]...”’
Allure was among the outlets that covered the launch of Mata’s line, Vertly, in August of that year. It was perhaps the first time we covered CBD skin care, and we didn’t know then that it would be far from the last. In the years that followed, cannabidiol took the beauty industry by storm, with searches for “CBD beauty” reaching a peak of 57.2K in December 2019, according to consumer-insights platform Spate.
Back then, there were few controlled studies to support the alleged skin benefits of the ingredient, but dermatologists mostly agreed that CBD probably couldn’t do any harm — and some were quite bullish about its ability to soothe inflammatory conditions like acne and eczema. “There is rapidly growing evidence that supports the use of a variety of cannabinoids — including the naturally occurring cannabinoids produced by the endocannabinoid system in the human body — in skin care,” Adam Friedman, a professor of dermatology and the director of translational research at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences, told Allure in 2018. Some researchers were even looking at the ingredient's potential ability to treat skin cancers: A study published in the British Journal of Pharmacology a decade ago showed that CBD appears to literally “switch off” the uncontrolled skin-cell growth associated with some types of cancer.
Perhaps just as compelling as those potential benefits, though, was the sexy, mysterious story perpetuated by beauty marketers: Could the same stuff that gets you high also be the secret to glowier, softer, smoother, younger-looking skin? For the record, no: CBD is very different from THC, the psychoactive compound found in cannabis, so it won’t get you high.
With interest in CBD-beauty products still going strong, Allure published a shopping guide highlighting 21 CBD beauty products, including cleanser, deodorant, and scalp oil, on April 20, 2021 — the date is no coincidence. As of today, a little more than two years later, 13 of those listed products — about two-thirds — have been discontinued. The pitches for CBD-laced serums, eye creams, and lip glosses that once flooded Allure editors’ inboxes have slowed significantly or disappeared entirely.
Lord Jones, a brand that was widely considered a leader in the CBD beauty space (and whose tinctures and gummies were lined up on many beauty editors' desks), ceased US operations in May. Its sister brand, Happy Dance, cofounded by actor Kristen Bell, shut down completely. CBD beauty seems to be over as quickly as it began. What happened?
If you consider CBD skin care just another beauty trend, you might think the answer is obvious: Like any trend, it ran its course. You're not entirely wrong. The one-time darling of the beauty industry also found its way into your toilet (literally, you can buy CBD-enriched toilet paper), is next to you in barre class (CBD-infused leggings, anyone?), and even in your bed (would you pay $100 for “CBD-Technofiber” bed sheets?). CBD fatigue is very, very real.
But to paint CBD beauty with that same brush is to ignore its enormous impact on the industry, and the nuances of selling topical products with an ingredient that can be derived from a not-yet universally legal source.
To be clear, cannabidiol itself is not illegal. The Farm Bill, federally enacted in December 2018, removed hemp — defined as cannabis and derivatives of cannabis with extremely low concentrations of THC (no more than 0.3%) — from the definition of marijuana in the Controlled Substances Act. Still, the proximity of CBD to marijuana often rings alarm bells for e-commerce software systems like Shopify and advertising platforms such as Facebook.
In 2019, Casey Georgeson launched the beauty brand Saint Jane with one flagship product: Luxury Beauty Serum, a face oil containing 500 mg of CBD. “I think being a founder of a brand that has CBD in its products is 10 times harder [than being the founder of any other brand],” says Georgeson, citing the need for expensive insurance and high-risk payment processing as reasons why. “We just had to pay thousands of dollars to register in a state to sell CBD topicals, which other brands don't have to do.”
In addition, Georgeson says, her personal Facebook account is “forever banned” from using advertising tools on the platform after being flagged during the early days of the brand’s marketing efforts. It’s no wonder, she adds, that some retailers wouldn’t take on the risk of carrying her full line, which grew to include CBD-infused moisturizer and lip glosses, among other products.
Mata of Vertly echoes these frustrations — “We went through so many credit card processors that kept shutting us down” — and adds that organic marketing has also been a struggle. “We’re shadow-banned on Instagram,” she says. “Even if you follow us, we won’t come up to the top of your feed because we are considered [to be marketing] an illicit substance.” The brand has two separate websites: one that uses the term CBD and one that doesn’t, because the former gets shut down so often, says Mata. And because SEO algorithms value duration, that means the site is de-prioritized for would-be customers.
Instagram parent company Meta denies shadow-banning on its platforms; in 2020, Instagram chief Adam Mossier said shadow-banning is “not a thing.” Most internet users probably disagree, but it is hard to prove, and even harder to tie to a specific word. And all of the brand founders we speak with here have a similar story to tell. (It’s worth noting that the original art for this story included two cannabis leaves, to which our associate director of social media said, “Hell, no,” for fear it could be slapped with a “sensitive content” advisory.)
Last month, Paris-based brand Typology attempted to launch its existing CBD products in the US, only to be flagged by Google. The company attempted to repeal the ban, but the damage had been done: Typology pulled the products from its virtual American shelves, though the brand continues to sell them in France.
“If you’re trying to go global, [having CBD in your products] could be a deal-breaker,” says Dianna Ruth, a cofounder of Milk Makeup and the product developer behind its Kush line of products, which use cannabis sativa seed oil. (While derived from a different part of the plant, this ingredient must also be certified THC-free to be sold in the United States.)
In many countries, CBD is illegal or available by prescription only. And even if it’s not illegal, it might be frowned upon. Says Ruth, Disney officials decreed that nothing cannabis-adjacent could be sold at the Sephora inside Disney Springs, the shopping complex at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando.
Sephora declined to comment for this story, but has clearly pulled way back on CBD beauty: Four years after the company started selling CBD products in its stores and online, Sephora.com’s CBD skin-care page includes only four brands and 11 products.
A press statement released by Lord Jones — which was purchased by the global cannabinoid company Cronos Group in 2019 for a reported $300 million — alludes to its own set of struggles. It was announced that the brand would be relaunched as an “adult-use" cannabis brand, as opposed to a CBD-beauty and ingestibles brand, in Canada to “improve its cash flow in the near term and position itself to directly enter the US THC market when the necessary changes in US regulatory conditions occur.” (We reached out to Cronos Group for further comment but did not immediately receive a response.)
It’s hard to know the extent of CBD beauty's consumer impact, but there is an inequity in the related conversation that has always been hard to ignore: CBD beauty brands — many selling at luxury price points, the majority of them white-owned — have been profiting from a plant that has sent many Black and Latinx people to prison. There have been some attempts to address that inequity — as with the Floret Coalition, a group of cannabis-related businesses that have joined forces to give back to organizations serving Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities through social advocacy and monetary donations — but they are few and far between.
Ultimately, it’s a chicken-or-the-egg scenario: Did brands get backed into a corner that made it near impossible to market and sell CBD products or were consumers “over” CBD beauty before they had the chance to miss it? Either way, according to Spate, searches for CBD beauty are down 63.1% year over year (from June 2022 to June 2023).
A number of brands that bet big on CBD, like WLDKAT and Georgeson’s Saint Jane, reformulated some of their products to not include the ingredient to avoid regulatory pitfalls and, presumably, distance themselves from the slowing trend. (The name of Georgeson's brand is both a wink at marijuana or “Mary Jane” and an ode to the patron saint of mothers, widows, and wives, chosen in alignment with the brand’s commitment to supporting women-centric charities, so it remains.) WLDKAT, perhaps, did not act quickly enough: It shuttered this year, not long after reformulating.
“We've had a couple of really high-end [retail] accounts tell us they loved CBD in our Hydrating Petal Cream or our glosses," says Georgeson. “And we were like, ‘Well, yeah, so did we.’ But we just feel like we've got so much more potential for this beautiful formula if we're able to advertise it and able to get it out there."
Still, under the right regulatory conditions and with clinical backing to prove the depth and breadth of cannabidiol's benefits, Georgeson and other proponents of the ingredient are hopeful it can have a second coming. For now, Christina Ross, senior scientist at beauty retailer Credo, suspects that in lieu of cannabidiol, we’ll see an uptick in ingredients like arnica and calendula, which have soothing properties similar to CBD, but won’t lead brands into the literal or proverbial weeds.
Read more about ingredients:
- Snow Mushroom Might Be a Better Hydrator Than Hyaluronic Acid
- The Right Way to Cocktail Your Skin-Care Ingredients
- What Do All of Those Unpronounceable Words on Your Products' Ingredient Lists Mean?
Watch Jennifer Aniston react to TikTok trends:
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