We currently live in an era of Big Wellness, a time when people think nothing about dropping $10 on varietals of non-bovine milk (or mylk, if we’re being wyld) or using “vaginal steaming,” “sound bath,” and “jade rolling” in the same sentence. Compare the wellness movement to pop culture, and CBD oil would be as big as, say, Lizzo or Beyonce, or maybe even the two of them combined into one megaforce of supernova stardom.

Anyways, you get what I’m saying—you can find CBD in coffee, CBD in tea, CBD in gummy bears, CBD in cocktails, CBD in cereal, and even CBD in pet water (which, as the 2019 gods would have it, is an actual thing separate from human water).

dispensary Simply put, CBD is like, one degree below pumpkin spice on the “OMFG-this-thing-is-everywhere” scale (which, fingers crossed, means we may get a CBD Yankee Candle or CBD Starbucks latte sometime soon).

So obviously, as is the course of things trickling down the great commercial river, I started getting press releases about CBD beauty treatments. And, obviously, as someone who is a professional whitewater rafter of said commercial river, I was immediately intrigued.

Personally, I have the anxiety level of, say, a very nervous shih tzu let loose in the middle of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, so I’ve started incorporating CBD into my daily routine by way of drops and gummies. (I’ve forever sworn off THC after a particularly potent strain led me to lock myself in a Myrtle Beach bathroom, where for an hour I alternated between contemplating my own imminent death and peeling the skin off chicken nuggets. It was college, what can I say?)

But how would I feel about the overlapping circles of CBD and beauty treatments? On one hand it makes sense: combine two spheres of self-care into one all-encompassing nirvana of personal improvement. But on the other hand, would such treatments translate as a wayward Venn diagram simply preying upon consumer fascination with wellness? That is to say, not do shit, except leave you smelling like a giant hempseed?

There was only one way to find out—I’d try them all myself, naturally. The trenches are a dangerous place from which to report, but I am basically the Christiane Amanpour of beauty writing. No need to thank me for my service, readers.