The cannabis beauty game continues to heat up.

Marijuana company Beboe is making its first foray into the category with a sub-brand dubbed Beboe Therapies launching March 27. To start, Beboe Therapies will debut a face serum with 300 milligrams of full-spectrum CBD and sheet masks containing 50 milligrams of CBD. They retail for a luxury price point — $148 and $78, respectively — and will be sold on BeboeTherapies.com beginning April 1. Barneys New York has signed on as a wholesale partner for a later April release in its stores and on its website, and more luxury retail partners are in the works, said Scott Campbell, Beboe co-founder.

“CBD has become a huge thing, but we think it’s seldom understood. We see a lot of companies putting CBD in their products without really understanding its benefits or just for marketing purposes, and there is not an authority in the space,” said Campbell.

The brand is certainly on trend. According to cannabis market research firm Brightfield Group, the U.S. hemp-based CBD market will reach $22 billion by 2020. Beauty products are expected to account for 7 percent of that, at $1.6 billion.

Prior to the Beboe Therapies launch, Beboe, which was acquired by Green Thumb Industries for an undisclosed amount in February, had largely focused on selling vaporizer pens containing CBD and THC, and flavored pastilles on BeboeShop.com. It also sold its products at select retailers in legally sanctioned cannabis markets such as California and Colorado. Those included Rise’s medical dispensary chain and Barneys’ Beverly Hills flagship through its The High End cannabis lifestyle shop.

In addition, the company has done select collaborations with brands interested in the ingredient like Dirty Lemon and Goop. Those partnerships led to the creation of Beboe Therapies and the move into beauty, said Campbell.

Though Beboe Therapies will also be sold at Barneys, the company is primarily relying on its direct-to-consumer sales to gain more traction outside of California and Colorado. Other beauty and personal-care brands have run into awareness issues as marijuana is still illegal in most states and Google, Facebook and Instagram still do not allow drug or drug-related promotions on their sites. But Campbell is not deterred.

Without any paid promotions, ad buying or influencer activations, BeboeShop.com has seen a 1500 percent year-over-year spike in traffic in 2019 and revenue grew by 5 times in the last year. Because Beboe Therapies does not contain THC, which Beboe pens and pastilles do, thus, Campbell expects the brand’s beauty line to do surpass expectations.

“The caution you see with many of these companies that are interested in cannabis or CBD, like Coca-Cola or Avena, is they are worried it will negatively affect a core business or customer. But we are a weed company, so we are high-risk by nature,” said Campbell.

Still, other mainstream beauty retailers are dabbling in the movement, especially as female customers increasingly embrace the products. According to a weed-delivery service Eaze, female shoppers have doubled in the last year and account for 38 percent of all cannabis users. CBD skin-care brand Cannuka landed in Ulta Beauty this month for that reason, and Lord Jones High CBD Formula Body Lotion launched in Sephora in October 2018. (Sephora also sells Kiehl’s and High Beauty, both of which sell products featuring cannabis sativa seed oil extracts.)

Like Beboe, Beboe Therapies will be a “female-leaning” brand, said Campbell, and it is targeting women between the ages of 27 to 45.

Fittingly, Campbell chose to focus on skin-care products combating skin concerns, like anti-aging and acne, rather than cosmetics. “I saw a CBD mascara. That makes no sense at all, because the receptors CBD facilitates are not in your eyelashes, and your eyelashes are not living cells,” he said. Milk Makeup sells a hemp-derived cannabis seed oil mascara, and Saint Jane recently launched a collection of CBD-infused lip glosses and lipsticks.

“The CBD genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in, but there need to be brands that are leaders and guiding the conversation about what is snake oil and what is not,” said Campbell. “That’s what we are trying to be.”

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