“It makes
me laugh
when
people tell me that
they can buy CBD
anywhere. You can
buy a face cleanser
anywhere, too. It
doesn’t mean it’s the
same quality.”
— HANNAH DUNCAN
reliever and anti-inflammatory, properties that naturally
piqued the interest of those in the spa industry.
Demystifying CBD
Heather Kreider, who co-founded Pennsylvania-based
Hempfield Botanicals with her husband Nathan, notes
that education has played a big role in that shift. “Educating
our consumers and our spa partners on that specific
stigma is something we very much pride ourselves on.
It’s very quickly going away.”
Those shifting attitudes toward CBD and the spa industry’s
rising interest in it have been clear to Jaclyn Luongo
for a while now. Luongo, a licensed esthetician and
esthetics educator, suspected that CBD was more than
a trendy ingredient when she witnessed students’
eagerness to learn more about it. “Students are the ones
really hungry for whatever is out there, and whatever
knowledge and education that has to do with ingredients
or results, they’re going to seek it,” she says. “That’s where
I really started to see the demand a couple of years ago
with students asking, ‘Are we going to learn about CBD?’
‘What skin type is it best for?’ ‘What is the right percentage
of [CBD]?’‘How do we know what’s good? What’s
bad?’”
Questions like these, Luongo notes, are a byproduct
of therapists and service providers’ natural process of
constantly evaluating new techniques and ingredients in
search of better outcomes for their clients. “We’re seekers
and researchers at heart in the spa industry, so we know
ingredients. The industry never stops growing, learning,
evolving, so of course an esthetician is going to want to
learn about [CBD] and have the most current, innovative
options to provide for their clients.”
As massage therapists, estheticians, nail technicians
and other service providers continue learning more about
the use of CBD and integrate it more frequently into their
treatments, they pass that knowledge along to spa-goers
who receive those treatments, and those spa-goers may
be more likely to integrate CBD products into their overall
wellness routine and seek out treatments that utilize
it. That cycle is critical to bringing CBD fully into the
mainstream because it allows consumers to experience
the potential benefits of the ingredients under the
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AUGUST 2020 ■ PULSE 17