What is Live Resin?

Live! From New York! It’s… Resin? Live resin is popping up in all sorts of CBD products, from edibles to dabs to vape pens and cartridges. So, what exactly is it and where exactly does it come from? (Spoiler alert: not actually live from New York). A simple breakdown of these questions can give you a better understanding of the live resin products available to you, what their benefits are, and which options might be best for you.

What Exactly is Live Resin?

Live resin is a sticky, waxy, sometimes viscous extract that comes from all the parts of fresh, flash frozen hemp plants. Some concentrates, known as rosin, are made from only the cured and dried flowers of the hemp plant. You can learn about the differences between rosin and resin here.  However, because live resin uses the leaves, stalks, flowers, and branches in the extraction process, all the cannabinoids in the hemp plant are invited to the live resin party, making it a more complex concentrate with different therapeutic and psychoactive effects. We’ll discuss that more later.

How Is Live Resin Made?

To make live resin, mature hemp plants are harvested and then immediately cryogenically frozen while they are still fresh. As mentioned, this includes the leaves, stalks, flowers, and branches. The freezing process preserves all various chemical compounds within the hemp plant like the cannabinoids and terpenes before they have a chance to weaken or degrade. After the plants are frozen, they are then transferred to a lab where various types of solvents such are used to extract the chemical compounds from the plants. The most common solvent used is butane, but other solvents like ethanol, propane, or CO2 are also used. Because each solvent has its own benefits and drawbacks, most reputable producers of live resin use a proprietary blend of solvents to maximize the beneficial effects. The solvents are then cooked off in the lab, leaving only the pure extract of the hemp plants various oils and chemical compounds. 

Additionally, compounds within live resin can be distilled further into legal forms of THC like THC-O, Delta 8, and Delta 10. These CBD extracts are psychoactive and will get you high, so test the waters carefully. Additionally, these extracts can make you fail a drug test but you can find strategies for passing a test here.

If you haven’t figured it out already, this process is no DIY home chemistry project. It requires highly trained scientists and advanced technical equipment. You do not want to attempt this on your own, but you also don’t want to buy live resin from anywhere other than a highly reputable source with quality ingredients and lab results. At Green Dragon CBD, we only work with the most respected suppliers and provide lab results for each product.

How Does Live Resin Interact With My Body?

So now we know that live resin is an extract made from fresh hemp plants and the extraction process involves solvents used to pull cannabinoids and terpenes from all the various pieces and parts of those flash frozen plants. But what does that mean for you?

Cannabinoids are naturally occurring chemical compounds that occur in hemp, cannabis, and other plants, as well as naturally in your body. They react with your endocannabinoid system, which is a system of receptors in your body to help regulate a wide variety of your body’s functions. You can learn all about CBD and the ECS here. But simply speaking there are different kinds of receptors in the ECS and they interact with cannabinoids differently, so the type of CBD product you ingest will have different effects and intensities. Three popular ways of categorizing CBD products are: CBD Isolates, Broad Spectrum CBD, and Full Spectrum CBD.

CBD Isolates

These are fairly self-explanatory. They isolate the CBD in hemp and concentrate it to a 99.9% purity. These products contain no other cannabinoids other than CBD, they are not psychoactive in any way, but they do have a wide variety of therapeutic effects. 

Broad Spectrum CBD

Broad spectrum CBD products have the full range of cannabinoids but with 100% of the THC removed. Under the 2018 Farm Bill CBD products can contain up to 0.3% THC, but spectrum have all THC removed so that they are 0% THC.

Full Spectrum CBD

Full spectrum CBD products have the entire range of cannabinoids, including the THC and the terpenes. This means that all the cannabinoids, including THC are retained in the resulting extract. The concentration of THC must be less than 0.3% by weight to be legal federally.

Live resin is a Full Spectrum CBD product, so it contains all those cannabinoids, terpenes, and other chemical compounds like flavonoids. You can learn all about terpenes here, but they’re essentially the aromatic oils that give cannabis products their distinct smells and flavors. All of those compounds work synergistically in what is known as the entourage effect to give a more robust but modulated experience.

What are the Benefits of Live Resin?

With all of the terpenes and flavonoids kept intact from the flash freezing process, live resin products have fresh, clean, strong flavors and scents. These flavors make for great edible and vape products. But the benefits of live resin go well beyond the delicious taste. As a full spectrum product, live resin has a long list of benefits, both therapeutic and psychoactive.

• Pain relief
• Anxiety relief
• Depression relief
• Sleep aid
• Appetite management
• Relaxation aid
• Enhanced creativity
• Euphoria

These are many of the benefits of live resin products, but the list continues. However, it’s important to understand that live resin products will affect each user differently, this can be affected by your gender, biomass, and brain chemistry. Dosing is important to an ideal experience. It is recommended that you start with a small dose and then wait between 30 and 45 minutes to allow the full effect to set in. From that point, you can adjust your dosing to suit your own needs. 

If you’re ready to go live and try the full live resin experience, there’s no better place to start than The Green Dragon CBD. You can try all of our live resin products below to reap the many benefits of live resin.

‍

‍

‍