What Does Sephora's Clean Beauty Standard Mean for CBD?
Sephora’s recent ruling through their clean beauty standards could have practical implications for the industry. Their recently released decision that for the brand to stock a product containing hemp or CBD it must adhere to these four rules:
Exclusively contain full-spectrum or broad-spectrum Hemp CBD extracts, no isolate.
Be derived from hemp grown in the U.S.
Be accompanied by a certificate of analysis that could be made available for customers upon request
Be tested three times for quality and purity
Comply with the “Clean At Sephora” standards
The majority of these requirements is nothing new to anyone in the industry working with any kind of GMP or ISO certified facilities. If you are making your product on your own, these testing and documentation requirements may be outside of your abilities and would require a third-party lab facility.
Their requirement to exclusively contain broad-spectrum Hemp CBD extracts, and not any isolate, is very interesting. While broad spectrum oils lend themselves very well to anhydrous formulas like tinctures, face serums, balms, and salves. We anticipate during the first stages of our R&D with our vendors that the heavy body creams, and face creams may take a good bit of tweaking and reformulating to stabilize.
Part of the appeal of isolate is that for those of us doing this at scale we get a level of consistency of raw material in the isolate that it is one less thing in a formula to worry about. You may find yourself in a situation where you are dealing with a cleanser that is very delicate and already difficult to produce at scale. This could mean huge changes in consistency and you simply may not be able to offer that product at Sephora.
It’s understandable that Sephora wouldn’t allow isolate, since it is refined and processed. But there isn’t any evidence that suggests there is something harmful about isolate. From an efficacy standpoint, there is a benefit to using broad spectrum oil, but where isolate excels is in consistency and quality control. This makes isolate superior from a large-scale production standpoint.