Why Mints Are Better Than Oils for Taking CBD

When we first began recommending CBD to our friends and family, the best thing was watching them find a new supplement for improving their health. The worst part was watching the grimace on their face as they swallowed the oily substance.

So when we created Lucent Botanicals we didn’t want to just create targeted benefits for CBD, terpenes and other botanicals, we wanted to enhance the experience of taking that CBD, and in talking to hundreds of people we identified four main problems we were determined to improve:

Taste: Even when flavored, oils invariably end up tasting swampy or often just “like weed,” and the texture is off-putting; those oils can feel as slimy in your mouth as a swamp, too. It’s like we turned back the clock to the 19th century and are forcing down spoonfuls of castor oil and other greasy potions.

Convenience & Discretion: A conversation with one woman in her late 20s stands out here. She was taking a CBD tincture to help with her anxiety, and it was working, but she would go sneak to the bathroom at work to take her mid-day dose—it felt too strangely awkward to pull out a bottle and dropper in front of co-workers. And she was always worried that the bottle would spill, leaving her bag an oily mess.

Dosage: Most people have no idea how much CBD is actually in the dropper-full they’re taking, and even if they do, it’s almost impossible to get a full dropper in one pull. “Does that look like...2/3rds of a dropper? 3/4ths? So how much CBD did I actually take?” The experience is so confusing most don’t even bother to think about dosage at all.

Wasted CBD: CBD is more effectively absorbed through the mouth than through the digestive system, where enzymes break the CBD molecules down, dulling the CBD’s impact and lengthening the time to effect. With oils, that means you either have to hold the oil in your mouth for a prolonged amount of time, which as we’ve established is a pretty unpleasant experience, or be resigned to effectively wasting much of the CBD you’ve ingested.

After months of experimenting in our test kitchen, we landed on mints as the best possible solution to those problems.

First, they’d taste fresh and subtly delicious, not swampy. Second, as mints they’d be small and easy to put in your pocket or bag, then take on the go anytime, any place. Third, each mint would be exactly 10 mg, allowing everyone to easily find their own perfect dose. And finally, mints would allow the CBD to be easily absorbed in your mouth, not by your digestive system, effectively giving you more CBD for your money.

Yes, making mints is more difficult—making CBD oil can be as simple as stirring together hemp oil and coconut oil, for example—but with our focus on both the efficacy and experience of taking CBD, we believe the extra time and work involved in making mints is more than worth it.

Frankly, being able to so dramatically improve the experience of taking CBD is a real point of pride among the Lucent team, and we invite you to elevate your own experience with mints—not oil.

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