TERPENES 101

You may be wondering, what are terpenes and how do they affect CBD products? Like cannabinoids such as CBD and THC, terpenes are small molecules produced naturally by the hemp and cannabis plant. They are not unique to cannabis, though. Every plant makes terpenoids, and some of them are fundamental to plant life — the pigments that make leaves green, the sterols in cell membranes, several of the hormones plants use to grow. A subset of plants also produce the volatile, aromatic terpenes that give herbs, citrus peel and pine forests their smell.

Those aromatic terpenes do real work for the plant. They have been described in the research as part of how plants defend themselves and communicate: deterring herbivores, inhibiting fungi and bacteria, signalling to neighbouring plants, and attracting pollinators and seed dispersers.

Essential oils are largely made of them — complex volatile mixtures dominated by monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes, with diterpenes and phenylpropanoids present to varying extents. The family is enormous. More than 80,000 terpenoids have been characterised, accounting for nearly a third of all compounds in the Dictionary of Natural Products. Cannabis carries its share: a 2021 review of the plant’s chemistry catalogues 120 terpenes.

Where Terpenes Fit at Entourus

Entourus CBD + Terpenes topicals are built around a blend of more than fifty botanically derived terpenes. Cannabis owes its smell to terpenoids rather than cannabinoids — and whether they also shape how a full-spectrum extract behaves, the idea usually called the entourage effect, is an active and unsettled question in the research.

Where a lot of products add a handful of terpenes at the end for scent, ours were chosen deliberately by our formulation team to sit alongside the full-spectrum CBD we grow in Oregon. That is a formulation decision rather than a claim about what the blend will do for you — the honest position is that the science here is promising and still being worked out.

If you want to go deeper on a single compound, our guide to the limonene terpene takes one of the best-studied examples and looks at what the research actually shows. And the CBD + Terpenes line is where the blend actually lives.

Every Entourus salve uses full-spectrum CBD from non-GMO hemp grown in Central Oregon. Our CBD + Terpenes line adds a proprietary blend of more than fifty botanically derived terpenes, including limonene and humulene. Both lines come in 1000, 1500 and 2000 MG per 50 ML jar.

Learn more about cannabis topicals on our FAQ.