The US Pharmacopei-who?

Hey friends,

Everyone knows we've been all about cannabis terpenes since day one. Every product on our menu has one of our color-coded terpene wheels attached to it, and we built our "Effects" filters around terpene dominance from the start. We ditched "indica" and "sativa" because in our own experience and according to science, those labels were wildly inconsistent and never supported for actually determining effects.

And now we just gave our system a little upgrade, and we’re pretty jazzed about it.

You can now also use the new "Tags" tab in every category to browse by dominant and co-dominant terpene profiles

Let us nerd out for a second: Up until now, we relied on our “Effects” filter to give you the big-picture direction for terpene profiles. “Energized” brought up products with tons of limonene(yellow), “Relaxed” brought up products with lots of myrcene (light green) - you get the idea.

You can still use those filters, but our new Tags tab goes one level deeper. It shows you exactly which terpene profiles are driving your experience, and it uses a scientifically-supported standard for what counts as "dominant" versus "co-dominant" from the U.S. Pharmacopeia - the independent scientific organization that sets the quality and safety benchmarks regulators like the FDA use to enforce drug quality laws.

You, Me, and the USP

In a 2020 paper, USP scientists proposed that cannabis products should be classified based on their terpene profiles (that’s what we do here at Blue Violets!)

Specifically though, the paper recommended using a “less than” 2:1 (<2:1) ratio to determine whether a profile is co-dominant with multiple terpenes.

This means you look at the top terpene first - let’s say it’s limonene at 1.00% - and then measure the following terpenes to determine which, if any, are at least half of that first terpene.

So in this example if .80% myrcene is next - definitely at least half of 1.00 - so the profile is considered co-dominant. If the third terpene is caryophyllene at .60%? Same thing, now it’s co-dominant with all three terpenes - and nowthere’s a Tag for that!

Making Your Experience Better

We’ve had the incredible experience of watching so many customers discover terpenes, learn which ones they like (and which they don’t!), and get the real experiences they’ve been looking for, so we’re pretty excited to share these new Tags to help guide you with even finer specificity and help as you learn the nuanced differences from all the unique terpene profiles.

And honestly? We think this is where the whole industry is headed. With cannabis rescheduling on the horizon and regulators starting to look a lot more closely at how this industry talks about its own products, we feel confident we’re already building around real standards rather than scrambling to catch up later. This has always been our approach - the Tags and the USP framework just gives us a more solid foundation to keep doing it well.

Go try it out! Head to any category on our menu, tap the Tags tab (it’s the last filter option), and filter by whatever terpene profile sounds good. Max has been loving caryophyllene-limonene-linalool (a classic “Marker” profile), while Lauren is feeling nostalgic for Harmony’s Chrome Cake with anything in the terpinolene-myrcene tag.

Thanks for shopping with us, and for always being up for a little terpene education.

Warmly, Lauren & Max