9 Product Launches That Show Weed Wellness Isn’t Going Anywhere

Now that CBD has been declared dead in numerous think pieces, it’s time for cannabis wellness and lifestyle brands that don’t chase the latest trends to truly shine. While CBD has fallen out of favor as a beauty product ingredient, thanks in part to ongoing legal uncertainty that’s bedeviled brands and retailers using it, many brands that believe in its benefits continue to create products with it as well as other cannabinoids.

In celebration of 4/20, we spotlight a handful of products that prove that innovative, independent brands haven’t given up on the weed-adjacent wellness category.

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From the company behind Manhattan dispensary Gotham, $45 My Sweet Jane is a new CBD-infused functional fragrance that comes in four scents: Because of the Night, My Sweet Jane, Lo Fidelity and A Thousand Kisses. 

Gotham My Sweet Jane CBD Fragrance Roller: The gorgeous two-story Gotham dispensary in Manhattan is a stark contrast to the innumerable grimy smoke shops that seem to occupy every other New York City corner. It opened its doors in March last year to offer premium cannabis and CBD products, including from its in-house brand, Gotham Goods, which has lotions, candles, bath soaks, tinctures and muscle salves.

Gotham’s latest product launch is functional fragrance $45 My Sweet Jane. CBD gives the fragrance a therapeutic benefit, and it’s available in four scents: garden rose, olibanum, sun-tanned leather and smoke Because of the Night; smoked birch, bergamot, fir needle and oak moss My Sweet Jane; night-blooming jasmine, soft musk, amber and verdant ivy A Thousand Kisses; and Haitian vetiver, myrcene and crushed flower Lo Fidelity.

The scents were inspired by the art, culture and music of New York City’s iconic Bowery street. “There’s a story behind each fragrance,” says Zoe Maya Jones Abudu, director of Gotham Goods. “With notes ranging from verdant soft florals to deep woods, the collection reflects an eclectic mix of vibrant, edgy, fresh and tranquil.” 

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Charlotte’s Web Stay Asleep gummy supplement is priced at $29.99 and contains 20 milligrams of CBN.

Charlotte’s Web Stay Asleep CBN Gummies: Charlotte’s Web was an early mover in the CBD ingestible space. Over a decade ago, it was started with an oil containing high CBD content and low THC content that helped young epileptic Charlotte Figi drastically reduce the occurrence of seizures she experienced due to Dravet Syndrome.

Today, Charlotte’s Web offers dozens of CBD products such as tinctures, capsules, gummies and topicals for people and pets to support immunity, sport recovery, rest and more. The company, which already sells $29.99 CBD- and melatonin-infused gummy Sleep, has added $29.99 CBN-infused gummy Stay Asleep to its lineup to foster uninterrupted rest.

Stay Asleep comes in a huckleberry flavor, and each serving contains 20 milligrams of CBN. Charlotte’s Web points to peer-reviewed research showing the dosage to be effective in addressing sleep disturbances.

Jared Stanley, co-founder and chief commercial officer at Charlotte’s Web, says, “We’ve been quietly studying this proprietary sleep formulation for years, and we’re proud to make it available to sleep seekers who want to experience their best nights and days.” 

Puff Herbals Lung Lube: Founded by herbalist Lian Bruno in 2019, Puff Herbals says it advocates “herbalism for smokers of all plants.” The brand sells organic and tobacco-free herbal smoke blends, herbal cigarettes, herbal spliffs and smokable herbs.

Bruno enjoys the benefits of smoking herbs, but acknowledges the damage that smoking can cause. To counteract deleterious effects, she developed $19 Lung Lube, an after-smoke syrup formulated with marshmallow leaf, cooling peppermint, thyme, calendula flower, plantain leaf and raw honey for immediate respiratory relief from smoking and smokers’ long-term wellness.

Bruno says, “Smoke is very hot and drying, so I wanted to create a cooling, moistening syrup that provides support beyond just the act of smoking itself.” She expounds, “Our mission at Puff Herbals is to offer holistic, harm-reducing solutions for smokers of all plants, and Lung Lube is our inaugural non-smokable product that provides both acute aid to those who took too big of a bong hit as well as overall respiratory and immune support specifically for regular smokers.” 

Vital Tonics The Night Capsules: Vital Tonics founder Natalie Bustamante created The Night Capsules because the brand’s community was clamoring for a sleep product. She received an overwhelming response prior to the product’s launch when she asked members of the community if they wanted to test samples. Hundreds of would-be testers were game. 

“We’ve never had that many people volunteer to test out a product and begging us for a sample,” says Bustamante. “It made us realize that quality of sleep equals quality of life. We had people telling us they were going crazy because they couldn’t fall asleep.”

Once testers used the product, which contains 20 milligrams of CBD and 10 milligrams of CBN, they gushed about it, and it’s quickly become a bestseller. Bustamante reports it assisted them with sleep, but “didn’t make them groggy like melatonin and also helped with anxiety, aches and pains.” She adds, “Our customers get the sleep support while also getting all the anti-inflammatory and anti-anxiety benefits from the CBD.”

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Kush Queen’s $20 Tolerance Break Gummies contains a proprietary blend of ingredients, including agmatine sulfate and L-tyrosine, to reduce tolerance levels by targeting mechanisms involved in tolerance buildup.

Kush Queen Tolerance Break Gummy: Regular substance users are increasingly taking tolerance breaks or t-breaks for short to rebuild tolerance. Kush Queen founder and CEO Olivia Alexander has created gummies to abbreviate t-breaks. The brand’s $20 Tolerance Break Gummies contain a proprietary blend of ingredients, including agmatine sulfate and L-tyrosine, to reduce tolerance levels by targeting mechanisms involved in tolerance buildup.

“Agmatine is being sold as a supplement, but it is not being sold as a CPG product,” says Alexander, a longtime user of agmatine to fight tolerance. “Kava and kratom and cannabis are so popular and people’s drug tolerances build so fast, and this actually works so brilliantly on tolerance and people are not using it that way. That’s when I was like, oh, we’ve got to make this into a CPG product. It needs to be a finished good.”

Alexander points out the cannabis industry hasn’t tried to address tolerance because it’s worried it will lose customers. “I believe, if you don’t address the tolerance, you will lose them as a customer, if that makes sense,” she says. “Eventually they just have to stop using weed…I don’t want people to feel that they have to quit cannabis in order to use cannabis again because there’s actually things that you could be taking that can help maintain the drug tolerance instead of going cold turkey.”

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New brand Solo’s first product, Glow Intimacy Oil Formula N°1, has an MCT oil-based formula packed with 450 milligrams of CBD and 25 milligrams of CBN along with cinnamon, vanilla, peppermint, kava kava root, cardamom, ginger root and  jasmine essential oil.

So(l)o Glow Intimacy Oil Formula N°1: So(l)o’s first product, Glow Intimacy Oil Formula N°1, has an MCT oil-based formula packed with 450 milligrams of CBD and 25 milligrams of CBN along with cinnamon, vanilla, peppermint, kava kava root, cardamom, ginger root and  jasmine essential oil. The ingredient profile was chosen to give Glow sensorial and aromatherapeutic benefits.

So(l)o founder Kya Blackstone is based in Berlin, but her brand is focused on selling in the United States at the outset. Blackstone is an American who quit her finance job and moved from Brooklyn to Berlin in 2021. She lauds Germany as a great place to start a company. 

“Berlin is so much cheaper than living in the U.S.” says Blackstone. “If I was still in New York, I would have to be in finance. I could never do this at the same time as I had my job, and it’s such a sex-positive city, too.”

Snugbox Celestial Stash Box: Snugbox founder Mari Denby has meticulously designed her brand’s $159 boxes to house all of mothers’ little helpers often relegated to the back of the bra drawer in plain sight. Denby knows a thing or two about bringing efficiency to stressful situations. Prior to starting Snugbox, she spent more than a decade as a global advisor at Unicef.

“I was often in emergency zones traveling around Pakistan or Iraq. I wasn’t the first line of people jumping off the whole object. I was the person with the clipboard and the calculator trying to figure out how do we optimize this, which was wonderful, but my meetings would start with statistics on child deaths,” recounts Denby. “Increasingly, over the course of the pandemic, I felt very burnt out.”

She also had her third child in the middle of the pandemic and wanted fun work that required less travel. Snugbox was born to help stylish moms like herself have a secure, yet easily accessible space to stash gummies, lube and whatever else they use to unwind. 

“If you’re California sober, you put it right up on your bar and it’s something that you can enjoy with guests or display in your home, just the way you would display a lovely bottle of liquor,” says Denby. “But also, to me, it’s about allowing women to celebrate self-care, to have that bit of privacy that often isn’t necessarily available to us and to have a way to relax and enjoy ourselves.”

To that end, Snugbox’s boxes are built to house sex devices, too. They have grommets in the back that allow devices locked inside to be charged in a nearby outlet.

Element Apothec Calm, Cool, Collected Tincture: CBD tinctures were among the main products that ignited the initial CBD craze, and brands dedicated to the molecule are still churning out quality ingestible wellness offerings. Element Apothec’s CBD- and CBG-infused Calm, Cool, Collected Tincture is the brand’s bestselling product.

In addition to CBD and CBG, the tincture’s formula has beneficial botanicals like lavender, vanilla and orange essential oils. It’s available in two strengths: $49.99 for a bottle with 500 milligrams of cannabinoids and $99.99 for a bottle with 1,500 milligrams of cannabinoids.

Element Apothec co-founder and CEO Davina Kaonohi says the oil-based product is “meticulously formulated to offer individuals seeking mental clarity, stress relief and overall body wellness a natural solution that harmonizes with their well-being.”

Element Apothec is playing the hemp wellness long game by keeping science at the fore—and in its c-suite. It just appointed pharmacist and functional medicine doctor Chloe Anastasia Givens as its chief scientific officer who joins fellow pharmacist Swathi Varanasi-Diaz’s who is the brand’s president of life sciences.

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An all-natural blend of botanical oils, Jomo London’s CBD Arousal Oil can be used as both a sensual massage and an arousal oil. Kalila Bolton

Jomo London CBD Arousal Oil: Jomo London co-founder Olivia Bentley says, “When we discovered the powerful properties of CBD and its benefits on wellbeing, we thought what could be better than incorporating these into sex with a CBD-infused arousal oil? Formulated to increase blood flow and heighten sensitivity, CBD is the perfect partner to enhancing your intimate moments.”

Holly Jackson, co-founder of British sexual wellness e-tailer SheSpot, is a big proponent of Jomo London’s CBD Arousal Oil, which is priced at 48 pounds or roughly $60 at the current exchange rate. The product is included in a selection of over 70 products SheSpot has curated for the British retail chain Superdrug. 

“Celebrating intimacy and elevating pleasure for all, Jomo’s ethos resonates with our mission at SheSpot to empower women to explore their sexual wellbeing,” says Jackson. “We love that Jomo’s signature CBD Arousal Oil not only delivers functional benefits but also looks and feels truly luxurious.” 

SheSpot is bullish on CBD as a sexual wellness star, but its payment gateway provider doesn’t share its enthusiasm, and the e-tailer has had to avoid selling CBD products, including Jomo London’s CBD Arousal Oil, as a result. The good news, says Jackson, is that “as a big player with an established CBD presence, Superdrug is able to list the product, so we sell CBD in our Superdrug e-concession through them.”