Vitality CBD Natural Oral Drops, 30ml

The most reliable description of this bottle came from a regulator

The Food Standards Agency maintains a public list of CBD products linked to novel food applications. It is free to search, and every entry carries a product name submitted by the company itself and then checked.

The entry for this product reads: Vitality CBD Oral Drops in Hemp Seed Oil, 1200mg, Natural, 30ml. The company is recorded as Vitality CBD Ltd, the status is validated, the reference is RP-88, and the record was last updated in July 2023.

That single line names the format, the carrier oil, the strength, the flavour and the bottle size. It is more complete than most of the shop listings we read while researching this page, and unlike them it was not written by a marketing team or copied between products.

This is worth knowing beyond this one bottle. Where a brand's retail data is unreliable, the FSA register is a free way to check what a product actually is, and almost nobody uses it that way.

One thing it does not mean, and this matters. Appearing on the public list is not the same as being authorised. The list records applications working through a process, and the FSA is explicit that inclusion is no guarantee of the outcome. Our explainer sets out what the register does and does not tell you.

Shops disagree about whether this bottle is flavoured

Here is the open question, and we would rather show you it than pick a side.

Vitality's own site publishes the ingredients for its dual applicator range, and the Natural version of that product lists two things: MCT oil and hemp extract. No flavouring at all. We verified that directly.

The ingredient list circulating for these oral drops is different. Retailers publish it as CBD, raw organic hemp seed oil, and natural flavouring. Three things, with a flavouring in a product whose whole name is Natural.

There are two ways that could be true, and both are reasonable.

It may be genuine. Hemp seed oil has a strong green, seedy character where MCT is close to neutral, so a light flavouring to round it off makes sense in this bottle and not in the other one. Unflavoured hemp seed oil is a much bigger ask than unflavoured coconut oil.

Or it may be another instance of the copy-paste problem that runs through this brand's listings. A single ingredient block written for the Berry and Lemon drops, applied across the whole range including the version that has nothing added.

We cannot settle it from the sources available, so we are not going to state it either way. The label on the bottle is definitive and we would read that before assuming.

What hemp seed oil is like to take unflavoured

Whatever the answer above turns out to be, hemp seed oil is the dominant character in this bottle rather than a neutral background.

It is green in the way that a good olive oil is green: grassy, faintly nutty, with a slight bitterness at the end. In cooking that is a feature. Held under the tongue for a minute before swallowing, it is a more committed experience than a neutral carrier would be.

This is the practical difference between the two carriers Vitality uses across its range. MCT from coconut is close to a blank page, which is why the unflavoured version of that oil works. Hemp seed oil arrives with an opinion.

It also happens to mean that in this bottle the carrier and the active come from the same plant, which is not true of anything else Vitality makes. Our lemon drops listing goes into that.

Two practical notes. Hemp seed oil is less stable than MCT, so keep it cool and dark and away from a sunny windowsill, which our berry drops page covers in more detail. And if the taste is the obstacle rather than the oil itself, the flavoured versions of the same product exist for exactly that reason.

Where it sits in the Vitality range

Vitality splits its oral products along two lines: which carrier oil, and which applicator. Those two choices are what separate five otherwise similar bottles.

The drops use hemp seed oil and come with a pipette. The dual applicators and sprays use MCT and come with a spray head, a pipette, or both.

So the closest relative to this bottle is not the Natural dual applicator, despite the shared flavour name. It is the Berry and Lemon drops, which share the carrier, the applicator and the format and differ only in what has been added on top.

If you want unflavoured and neutral, the Natural dual applicator is the better fit because MCT gets out of the way. If you want unflavoured and are happy to taste hemp, this is the one.

Strengths, dosing, and one thing to ignore on other listings

The drops are made at 1200mg and 2400mg in the same 30ml bottle, which works out at forty and eighty milligrams in each millilitre. The FSA register entry above is for the 1200mg.

A pipette is a poor measuring instrument compared with a spray, because how much you draw depends on how hard and how long you squeeze. Treating a full pipette as a fixed dose is a mistake, and one pharmacy listing for this product manages to describe a full pipette as one millilitre and a daily amount as one point seven millilitres in the same breath, which cannot both be a serving.

More importantly, several listings for this bottle still instruct readers not to exceed seventy milligrams of CBD in twenty four hours. That figure is out of date. The Food Standards Agency revised its precautionary advice for healthy adults down to ten milligrams a day in October 2023, and our dosage explainer covers what that revision was based on.

Now the cautions. Skip this bottle if you dislike green, grassy oils, because hemp seed oil is exactly that and the Natural version has the least in front of it. Skip it if you want precise, repeatable amounts, because a pipette does not give you them and a spray head does. And skip it if you want the strongest thing on our shelf, because at these strengths it is a middle-of-the-range oil rather than a concentrated one.