Picture this: it’s 2018. You wake up. While getting ready for the day, you slather your face with a CBD skin serum that’s intended to reduce redness and inflammation. You head to the kitchen, where you add a few drops of CBD tincture to your water, because it’s supposed to increase feelings of peace and relaxation.
You pack lunch, making sure to include your CBD gummies and chocolate bar, so that come midday you can feel a burst of productivity. After you take a hit of your CBD vape and feed your dog a CBD treat, it’s time to go to work.
During your commute, you still feel frazzled, anxious, your face riddled with patches of dry skin. But you push this to the back of your mind, because CBD oil is everywhere and therefore must help with something. Plus you just read that they’re putting it into clothing now, however that works, which sounds like something you’d like to try.
Such were the salad days of the CBD boom. Five years later, the market for cannabidiol has gone bust, according to the New York Times.
Blame it on the fact that CBD’s legal status is tough to parse. (Cannabidiol, which does not produce a high or compel you to munch, is found in hemp, a cannabis plant with very low levels of THC; hemp-based CBD is legal at the federal level. CBD can also be derived from the marijuana plant, which contains higher levels of THC; this variation is not legal at the federal level.) That, plus the fact that more and more states have legalized actual weed, which could negate the desire for THC’s far less psychoactive cousin.
Once-promising CBD startups such as the makeup brand WLDKAT, which raised $5m in investments and was sold at Ulta Beauty and Target, and Happy Dance, a line of skincare fronted by the actor Kristen Bell, both shuttered last year.
Jonathan Eppers, a former tech worker, left the industry to start Vybes, a hemp-based CBD wellness drink. So far, Vybes has survived the CBD-pocalypse. But Eppers told the Times that he had struggled to partner with a major retailer, which had limited Vybes’ growth. In his words, a “patchwork of laws and regulations” have made it difficult to scale up.
Though the FDA has said that it must create “a new way forward” for CBD products, the agency declined to create rules that would allow for CBD use in dietary supplements and food. According to a 2023 statement, “this is because of two key factors: CBD’s inherent risk profile [and] the highly protective safety standards and the limited risk management options for the food ingredient and dietary supplement [regulatory] pathways”. (Though CBD is generally regarded as safe, side-effects can include nausea, fatigue and irritability, and the ingredient can affect the liver when taken in high doses.)
So, while hemp-based CBD is legal in the US, it’s a risk to invest in these businesses. As Eppers told the Times: “We made a drink that a lot of consumers want, but the big chains won’t touch it.”
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Neither will advertisers: TikTok bans discussion of CBD on its app, as the keyword “may be associated with behavior or content that violates [its] guidelines”. For years, Meta banned discussion of CBD products, though last year it loosened restrictions to permit ads for “non-ingestible” items.
Some theorize that the remaining CBD brands are just sticking it out until cannabis is fully legalized. As Forbes noted in 2019, companies can build name recognition selling CBD until the time comes to switch over to cannabis, rather than having to start from scratch.
For now, anyone who wants their CBD butt moisturizer, sleep aid or sports bra must go through smaller retailers or the direct-to-consumer route. Though chains like Barneys (RIP) and Neiman Marcus once devoted precious shelf-space to CBD products, that only happened in certain states.
Last year, Fashionista reported that “cannabis-centric brands are leaving the beauty market and others are quietly deleting CBD from their labels”.
A similar obituary, titled “We are gathered here today to say goodbye to CBD beauty”, came from Allure. The piece was punctuated with an illustration of a tombstone emblazoned with the words “RIP CBD”.
But what really killed CBD, or at least killed all those startups? You can blame the federal government or the fact that corporate behemoths are just too scared to go there. But it also comes down to another cold, hard fact: trends come and go, and CBD had its moment.