NOTE: This article is not a hit piece on Purple Sticky. They are a respectable company and a worthy competitor, offering a large selection of items we don't stock, like sexual party products, health and detox formulas, etc. Our only problem is with the way they, and many other companies, market their "sticky salvia".
Purple What?
One of the most popular brands of Salvia Divinorum extract, often sold through mom and pop smoke shops, but offered online as well, is Purple Sticky Salvia. Although Purple Sticky started around the same time that we did, they combined aggressive marketing and their location in California (well known for its large number of smoke shops) to spread their products and name brand, fast.
So effective have they been, that literally hundreds of smoke shops around America now stock Purple Sticky Salvia Extract. How do we know? Because we keep flipping those customers to buy from us instead! How do we do that? Simply by educating the smoke shop owner about salvia extracts, how they are manufactured, what they should look for in a quality extract, and why "sticky salvia" is ripping them blind.
Sticky Salvia
Have you ever wondered what makes "Sticky Salvia"... well, sticky? For anyone with a bachelor's degree in Chemistry (and yes, we've got ours), the answer is obvious. First, however, let's read through this promotional material Purple Sticky sends out to retailers:
Quote
Some companies claim to sell 10x and 20x. However, with crude salvia only one extract can be made based on the quality and quantity of the leaf. These companies sell some as 10x and some as 20x, hoping none realizes the exact amount of the active component Salvinorin-A.
One can tell which is 10x and which is 20x, because the color of Salvinorin-A is black.
For example, 20x should be twice as dark as 10x. An informed person can clearly see this difference! Moreover, upon depositing Salvinorin-A onto non-pulverized leaf, differentiating between 5x and 10x is difficult, since the flakes of green leaf obscure the color. Companies that sell cheap salvia extracts rely on this!
The first time we read this, we thought it was a joke. To start, Salvinorin-A is crystalline white, like fine sugar, not black! It doesn't have a color. That means no matter how much salvinorin-A you dump on green leaf, the color of the extract should remain relatively constant.
In fact, the only perceptable change you should see is tiny little crystals of salvinorin-A reflecting light off the leaf surface, like hundreds of little sparkles.
"Black" is Bad
Where is this "black" coming from that Purple Sticky is talking about? It's not the Salvinorin-A, so what is it? What's black in a leaf? Natural tars, resins and waxes - to get technical, lipids. Tars, resins, waxes... that explains where the "sticky" comes from. So what?
Well, normally, these lipids would be filtered out in the extraction process. For example, here at BHB we use several different levels of filtration to separate out these lipids, along with other impurities, to prevent them from contaminating our extract.
Why is removing these natural tars and waxes so important? Because if we don't remove them, this black gunk will end up in your lungs! Your body will forcibly cough it up, if you're lucky, but in the meantime those tars will act like a toxin, leaching poisons into your bloodstream. Is that what you want? We didn't think so.
In addition to the health aspect, you should view this from an economic sense also. Let's say you buy 1 gram of extract. Well, if 20% of this 1gram is harmful tars and waxes, you actually bought only 0.8grams of extract. In other words, you wasted 20% of your money! By cleaning the extract to remove these impurities, you're getting the full product value for your money.
Any way you look at it, BLACK IS BAD!
Marketing Shmarketing
So, now that we understand that "black is bad", why would Purple Sticky tell their customers that black is good? Like we wrote before, anyone with a bachelor's degree in Chemistry would know that black=lipids=unhealthy. And here we get to the bottom line.
Purple Sticky doesn't filter their extract to remove these unhealthy impurities. That's why their extract is black and sticky. Why don't they filter the extract? Maybe they don't know how, or maybe they don't care about your health. That's a question only they can answer. The worst part, from our standpoint, is that they and other companies purposely MISLEAD customers about what is a high quality extract. They try to claim that their product is good by lying about what a good product is. That's like a coal company saying that coal is clean because all the toxic byproducts that get smokestacked into the atmosphere are actually good for us. In other words, they compensate for a poor product with excellent (misleading) marketing.
This is a serious accusation to make, but we stand by it. With the amount of money Purple Sticky makes, there is no reason why they can't afford to make clean, high quality extract. They screw their salvia extract customers, and that's the bottom line.
At BHB, you're not going to get a "sticky", "black" Salvia extract. With us, you will always get the best extract we know how to produce. How can you tell? Look closely at our extract under a light. You see all those sparkles? Those are pure salvinorin-A crystals. The higher the extract strength (5x, 10x, 20x, etc.), the more crystals you will see. That's how you tell a quality extract, and that quality is what you will get from us.
About Blackhatbotanicals.com
Black Hat Botanicals (BHB) has been providing Exotic Herbs and Herbal Extracts since 2003. From Virginia to California, Texas to Maine, our products have emerged as a standard of quality in smoke shops and convenience stores across the United States, and at select online merchant sites.
For more information, or to buy salvia, visit  www.blackhatbotanicals.com or contact info@blackhatbotanicals.com
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