Vitality CBD Natural Dual Applicator, 30ml

Two ingredients, and what that actually means

Vitality publishes a full ingredient list for each version of this oil. Set them side by side and the difference is a single line.

Berry is raw organic MCT oil from coconut, CBD hemp extract, and natural berry flavour. Lemon is the same two plus natural lemon flavour. Natural is raw organic MCT oil from coconut and CBD hemp extract, and then the list stops.

So this is not a third flavour sitting alongside the other two. It is the base that the other two are built on, sold as it comes.

That makes it the only bottle in the range where what reaches your tongue is the carrier oil and the extract themselves, with nothing in front of them. Whether that is appealing or off-putting is a matter of taste, but it is at least an honest version of the product, and it is the only one of the three you can judge the underlying oil by.

The word natural is doing two opposite jobs on the same shelf

Here is a genuine trap in how this range is labelled, and it is worth a moment because it catches people.

On the Berry bottle, the third ingredient is written as natural berry flavour. There, natural is a qualifier describing where the flavouring came from. Something was added, and that something is of natural origin rather than synthetic.

On this bottle, Natural is the variant name, and it means the opposite: no flavouring was added at all.

Same word, same brand, same range, two meanings that point in different directions. A shopper glancing at a shelf could reasonably read Natural on this bottle as promising natural ingredients, when what it is actually promising is the absence of an ingredient.

The practical translation is simple. If you want the fewest things in the bottle, this is the one. If you want a flavour and you want that flavour to be naturally derived, the other two are also honestly labelled, just labelled with the same adjective doing a different job.

What an unflavoured oil tastes of

MCT oil from coconut is close to neutral but not silent. It reads faintly sweet and slightly waxy, and it coats the mouth in a way water-based things do not. That coating is most of the sensation.

Behind it sits the hemp extract, which is where the earthy, faintly grassy note comes from. In the flavoured versions the berry or lemon covers this. Here there is nothing in the way of it.

The result is mild rather than strong. Nobody would describe this as an unpleasant oil, but it is unmistakably an oil, and holding it under the tongue for a minute or so before swallowing means spending that time with it rather than getting it over with.

If you have tried a flavoured CBD oil and found the flavour cloying after a few weeks, which is a common enough experience with anything sweet taken daily, the unflavoured version tends to wear better precisely because there is less to get tired of.

The thing you can do with this bottle and not the others

An unflavoured oil goes into food and drink without arguing with it.

A berry oil in a coffee is a berry coffee. A lemon oil in a yoghurt is a lemon yoghurt. Neither is wrong, but both mean the oil decides what the food tastes of, and after a week of that the novelty runs out.

This bottle does not impose anything. It behaves like any other oil added to food: it will read slightly rich and slightly coating, and beyond that it stays out of the way. Warm food, savoury food, coffee, smoothies and yoghurt all take it without a clash.

Two practical notes if you go that route. Fat-soluble things belong with fat, so it will disperse in something creamy or oily and sit on the surface of anything watery. And putting it in food means swallowing it rather than holding it under the tongue, which is a different route into the body and not the one this bottle's spray head and pipette were designed around.

For context rather than instruction, the Food Standards Agency's precautionary advice for healthy adults is ten milligrams of CBD a day from supplements. That figure applies to what you take in total across the day, however you take it, and our dosage explainer sets out what it does and does not mean.

Strengths, and a misconception worth clearing up

The dual applicator is made at 2400mg and 4800mg in the same 30ml bottle, which works out at eighty and one hundred and sixty milligrams in each millilitre. Our Berry listing does the per-spray arithmetic on the stronger of those two if you want the working.

Now the misconception. A two-ingredient bottle can look like a stripped-back or entry-level version of a three-ingredient one, and it is not.

The strengths are the same across all three flavours. Natural at a given strength holds exactly as much CBD as Berry at that strength. What has been left out is flavouring, which contributes nothing to the extract content.

It is worth saying because the reverse assumption is common with food and drink, where a plainer version often is a lesser one. Here, plainer means fewer ingredients and nothing else.

Who should not buy this one

Anyone who dislikes the taste of oil. There is no flavouring here to hide behind, and if the reason you chose a flavoured CBD oil in the first place was to avoid tasting the oil, this bottle removes the thing that was helping you.

Anyone who wants the same unflavoured oil in hemp seed rather than coconut. Vitality's Natural Oral Drops are exactly that, and they taste noticeably greener because hemp seed oil has a character of its own where MCT mostly does not.

Anyone shopping on availability. The dual applicators move in and out of stock more than the rest of the range, and the stronger of the two strengths is often the one missing.

One last point on accuracy. Some shops describe this oil as broad spectrum. Vitality's own site says it uses the same ninety-nine per cent pure CBD across all of its products, and ninety-nine per cent pure does not leave room for the additional compounds broad spectrum implies. Our record follows the brand rather than the retailers.