5 Best CBD Creams and Topical Lotions for Pain Relief in 2021

Many people take cannabidiol (CBD) oil or capsules every day to help combat chronic pain, anxiety, or a range of other health concerns. However, did you know that you can reap benefits from CBD without actually swallowing it?

CBD creams are topical lotions that contain cannabidiol along with other natural healing ingredients. Applying these creams to your skin can produce soothing, pain-relieving effects without the need for any harsh chemicals you may find in traditional healing or cooling creams.

If you're interested in trying CBD cream for yourself, you've come to the right place. We've scoured the Web to find the top five best CBD creams available on the market today. 

The 5 Best CBD Creams on the Market in 2021

• CBDistillery: Best variety of CBD topicals
• FAB CBD: Best topical CBD for pain relief
• Balance CBD: Best muscle rub for recovery
• Cheef Botanicals: Best CBD salves and bath bombs
• Joy Organics: Best broad-spectrum CBD creams
• Royal CBD: Best cream for sore muscles

#1 CBDistillery: Best Brand Overall

CBDistillery is our choice for the best CBD cream of 2021. Because CBD pain creams are less common than tinctures and oils, many customers have trouble finding a company that offers the perfect product for their needs. If you're looking for a company with a wide range of topical CBD creams, CBDistillery may be the best choice for you.

CBDistillery entered the market in 2016 and quickly became one of the most popular CBD brands in the U.S. Many customers appreciate CBDistillery’s low price point compared with similar companies and its bountiful catalog of oils, gummies, softgels, topicals, and powders.

CBDistillery offers several topical CBD products. Along with salves and creams, the company also sells cannabidiol-infused:

• Roll-on sticks
• Warming cream
• Cooling cream
• Body lotion
• Warming muscle melt
• Night cream
• Satin body cream
• Face cream

Both CBDistillery's original CBD salve and body cream contain full-spectrum CBD, while many of its other topical options utilize CBD isolate. Its products also vary in their cannabidiol content—some have as low as 150 mg of CBD, while more potent options include up to 1,000 mg. The company's broad product selection allows you to choose a topical that suits your needs to a T.

CBDistillery sources its hemp extract from non-GMO hemp seeds. The company also uses third-party testing to verify its products' CBD content—you can scan a QR code on every CBDistillery product to view that product's specific lab test results.

CBDistillery is one of the first CBD companies to receive certification from the U.S. Hemp Authority. The company adheres to stringent regulatory guidelines throughout its production process, ensuring that its products are of the highest quality possible.

Overall, CBDistillery is our top choice for offering the most creative, functional cannabidiol topicals.

• Non-GMO industrial grown hemp from the U.S.
• Topical CBD products include creams, salves, and lotions
• Skin care cream includes 500 mg of CBD
• Great brand reputation

Click Here to Visit the Official CBDistillery Website

#2 FAB CBD: Best Full-Spectrum CBD Creams

FAB CBD is our top pick for the best CBD cream for pain and inflammation. Over the past few years, FAB CBD has become one of the most reputable names in the CBD industry. This company sells a wide range of high-quality, trustworthy cannabidiol products, and some of its best-sellers are its topical creams and body salves.

FAB has been selling CBD products since October 2017. Its founders have extensive experience in the health and pharmaceutical industries, and they quickly put their knowledge to work to develop reliable CBD oils, gummies, capsules, and topicals.

This company sources its hemp from a farm in Colorado, so you can be sure that all its CBD pain relief creams meet federal standards for THC content and potency. FAB sells two topical products: a CBD cream and a body salve.

The company's topical CBD cream contains 600 mg of full-spectrum CBD hemp extract, along with natural ingredients such as coconut oil, cocoa butter, and blood orange essential oil. The company states that this product can support healthy recovery from exercise, a sense of calm and focus, and relief from everyday stressors.

FAB's 1000-mg and 3000-mg body salves contain distilled full-spectrum CBD along with ingredients that produce heating and cooling effects, such as menthol crystals and Cinnamomum camphora oil. This formula is ideal for active, athletic customers or those who experience daily discomfort.

Customers have saidthat the company’s CBD salve has helped relieve osteoarthritis pain, neck and shoulder tension, and lower back pain.

FAB utilizes third-party lab testing to ensure that its CBD pain relief cream contains accurate, legal amounts of cannabidiol. We appreciate FAB's commitment to producing reliable, effective cannabidiol products for its customers.

FAB offers some of the best CBD creams on the market, and we have ranked this company as one of the top brands for sale.

• Creams include 600 mg of CBD, full-spectrum hemp extract
• Organically grown hemp extract from Colorado
• Excellent customer service
• Third-party lab tested

Click Here to Visit the Official FAB CBD Website

#3 Balance CBD: Best Muscle Rub for Recovery

Balance CBD has developed a reputation for quality and affordability. CBD pain creams have grown in popularity for treating muscle aches and pains, but what’s often lost in conversation, is the importance of delivery.

Balance CBD employs Nanotechnology that allows their topicals to penetrate the skin, bringing fast-acting relief to the source of pain. Their CBD Cream produces rich aromas of lavender and rosemary that bring a feeling of calm, and the cooling sensation of menthol helps to alleviate deep muscle pains and aches. 

Their award-winning CBD cream has received rave reviews from a-list celebrities at numerous award ceremonies, from the Golden Globes, to the Emmy Awards and even the Oscars. 

This CBD pain cream is so talked about because it works! All of their products are held to the same high standard, and tested by a PhD in a third-party lab. Backed by a 30-day money back guarantee, customers can shop risk-free, and the company’s CBD topicals provide the best bang for buck on the market.

Balance’s 300mg muscle cream is a favorite for pain relief, but the company offers several product options for CBD topicals; customers can choose from massage oils, bath salts, and body lotions to fulfill pain management needs. Every CBD cream is priced below $40, making balance an incredibly affordable option for regular pain maintenance.

Given the company's stellar reputation and appealing topical options, customers would be wise to use Balance CBD topicals for their muscle aches and pains.

• 300mg muscle cream with nanotechnology
• 30-day money back guarantee
• Fast shipping
• Lab tested by a PhD
• 100% plant based

Click Here to Visit The Official Balance CBD Website

#4 Cheef Botanicals: Best for Arthritis Pain

Many customers use CBD topicals to relieve aches and pains resulting from arthritis. Cheef Botanicals is our favorite choice for customers experiencing arthritis pain because its CBD pain salve contains a unique blend of potent cannabidiol and natural pain-relieving ingredients.

Cheef Botanicals offers some of the highest-quality CBD topicals on the market. The company's founders have combined their extensive business and hemp knowledge to produce a wide selection of products ranging from tinctures to pet treats to topical lotions.

The company offers a moderate selection of topicals, including:

• Lip balm
• Bath bombs
• Relief salve
• Body lotion
• Hand sanitizer

Cheef Botanicals' CBD relief salve contains full-spectrum CBD, optimizing its healing properties. You can choose between 500 mg, 1,000 mg, or 2,000 mg of cannabidiol depending on your specific needs and desired potency. Because the salve contains a high cannabidiol concentration, it can penetrate deeply into your skin and produce powerful pain-relieving properties.

The relief salve also contains natural ingredients like coconut oil, fennel essential oil, peppermint oil, and vitamin E. These ingredients give the salve an earthy, calming scent. Once you apply the salve to your skin, it may begin providing relief in as few as five to 10 minutes, and its effects can last as long as three hours.

Along with being used by those wanting to reduce pain in target areas, Cheef Botanicals’ CBD salve is also often used to  also nourish dry skin, reduce swelling, speed up recovery, and improve your skin’s natural defenses. Gently rubbing the salve over the affected area and massaging it in may even  promote blood flow, maximizing the salve’s healing properties.

Cheef Botanicals recommends its relief salve for recovering athletes or customers who experience chronic pain. Altogether, this product is our favorite for customers experiencing arthritis pain because it provides longer-lasting relief than other products on the market.

Click Here to Visit the Official Cheef Botanicals Website

#5 Joy Organics CBD Creams: Best Value

Many of the companies on our list utilize full-spectrum CBD in their lotions. However, not everyone feels comfortable using products that contain even trace amounts of THC. Joy Organics is our favorite hemp company that offers broad-spectrum CBD topicals, from which the THC has been removed.

Joy and Todd Smith founded Joy Organics in 2018 in an attempt to discover an affordable, effective, natural solution for Joy's chronic pain and insomnia. The company uses pure, organically grown hemp and other natural ingredients to create CBD products you can trust.

Joy Organics sells a few topical cannabidiol products, including:

• Organic salve
• Bath bombs
• Sports cream
• Body cream
• Salve sticks

The company's original cream contains 250 mg of CBD with 0.0% THC. This unscented lotion also includes natural ingredients such as olive oil, aloe leaf juice, and safflower oleosomes. Its blend of high-quality cannabidiol and hydrating ingredients makes this cream a suitable solution for dry, itchy, dehydrated skin.

Meanwhile, the company's organic salve contains a combination of phytocannabinoid-rich hemp oil, essential oils, and organic beeswax to support healthy muscles and joints. This product includes 500 mg of cannabidiol in each jar, making it an ideal solution for athletes with sore muscles or customers who need fast-working natural pain relief.

Joy Organics advertises that its CBD products contain several naturally occurring components from the cannabis plant. Even though these creams do not contain THC, they can still produce the synergistic “Entourage Effect” in your body.

This company uses third-party lab testing to verify the quality and concentration of cannabidiol in each product. Joy Organics is also a member of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable, a non-profit organization committed to leading the way forward for CBD and hemp products.

Overall, Joy Organics sells some of the safest, most reliable THC-free CBD products on the market.

Click Here to Visit the Official Joy Organics Website

#6 Royal CBD: Broad-Spectrum CBD Cream with Zero THC

Everyone experiences sore muscles from time to time. Exercising, moving something heavy, sitting in the car too long, or even just stretching the wrong way can make your back, neck, arms, or leg muscles feel sore and painful. Keeping an effective CBD topical from Royal CBD on hand will ensure that you have a natural solution that may relieve your pain when you need it.

Royal CBD sells two high-quality, effective CBD topical products: a cool-relief CBD balm and an icy menthol roll-on gel.

The company's CBD balm contains 500 mg of broad-spectrum hemp extract, meaning it includes several cannabinoids and terpenes from the hemp plant aside from THC. Along with CBD, the cream also features ingredients like organic beeswax, coconut oil, menthol crystals, and essential oils.

Even though the company advertises its topical CBD cream as a "cool relief balm," this product provides a gentle warming sensation to relieve pain from sore muscles and joints.

Royal CBD’s roll-on gel offers cooling relief for sore muscles through three main ingredients: menthol, aloe vera, and 350 mg of CBD. The broad-spectrum pain gel is firmer than typical salves, allowing you to roll it onto problem areas directly. Once you apply it, the gel will absorb into your skin quickly, producing fast-acting pain relief.

Royal CBD manufactures its CBD pain relief creams in the U.S. and uses third-party lab testing to ensure each product’s quality and safety. The company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you are not satisfied with your purchase during this period, you can receive a full refund.

If you experience sore muscles every now and then, you can benefit from using Royal CBD pain cream to relieve your occasional pain.

• Contains 500mg of broad-spectrum hemp extract
• Provides gentle warming sensation or muscle and joint pain
• 10% of all cannabis products on first purchase
• Great customer service

Click Here to Visit the Official Royal CBD Website

What Is a CBD Cream?

“CBD cream” is a broad, catch-all term for any CBD product that you can apply to your skin. Topical CBD products come in various textures, scents, and potencies, and many contain additional ingredients that promote pain relief and healing alongside CBD.

How We Ranked the Top CBD Creams

You can find dozens of CBD manufacturers on the internet, but it may be challenging to determine which ones are safe and reliable and which could be trying to scam their customers. We selected the best CBD topical companies by examining the following qualities for each company:

Hemp Source

As you search for the best CBD product for your needs, you will probably notice that many companies indicate where they acquired their hemp: Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, or just the U.S. in general. These companies are specifying that they source their hemp from the United States instead of importing it from other countries, which is a vital distinction to make in the CBD industry.

U.S.-sourced hemp is safer and more trustworthy than internationally grown varieties. The United States implements stringent regulations about hemp production and CBD products. If companies do not follow these guidelines, they could risk hefty fines or even closure.

Meanwhile, overseas hemp manufacturers may not need to follow any production guidelines, so their hemp plants could be unsafe to consume.

We recommend purchasing CBD pain creams only from companies that utilize U.S.-grown hemp.

Type of Extracts

You can find three hemp extracts on the market: broad spectrum, full spectrum, and isolate.

The primary differences between these three varieties are their purity and the amount of THC they contain. Full-spectrum cannabidiol contains all of the cannabinoids found in the hemp plant, including small, legal amounts of THC (less than 0.3% by law). When you apply full-spectrum topicals to your skin, the various cannabinoids in the product work together to produce the Entourage Effect, maximizing their benefits.

Broad-spectrum cannabidiol is similar to full-spectrum in that it contains several other cannabinoids from the hemp plant. However, manufacturers manually remove any traces of THC from this extract.

To produce CBD isolate, manufacturers use a more refined extraction method that obtains pure cannabidiol from the hemp plant. The isolate form does not contain any additional cannabinoids or THC, but as a result, its health benefits are not as potent.

The best cannabidiol companies may offer any of these three types of extracts, and no one extract is better or safer than any others. The type you should choose ultimately comes down to personal preference. However, keep in mind that full-spectrum topicals may be more powerful and effective than the other two varieties.

Third-Party Lab-Tested

The best CBD companies utilize unbiased, third-party lab testing to verify the quality, purity, and potency of the cannabidiol in their products. These labs publish lab results for every batch of cannabidiol a manufacturer produces, allowing customers to trust that their CBD creams for pain relief hold up to manufacturers' claims.

Potency

Topical creams come in a wide range of potencies. Some CBD creams for pain relief contain as little as 100 mg of cannabidiol, while others have more potent concentrations of 1,000 mg or more. Typically, the higher the cannabidiol concentration, the more powerful a CBD pain cream will be.

However, if you have never tried cannabidiol before, you may want to start with a lower potency and build up to a higher one if necessary.

Price

You can find hemp cream in several price ranges across the Web. While we do not recommend purchasing a CBD topical that is unreasonably cheap, you do not need to spend outrageous amounts of money to buy a high-quality, trustworthy CBD topical cream. Most of the companies we reviewed offer effective cream and salve options from $40 to $70.

Scent

CBD by itself has a mild, earthy scent, but many companies add other natural ingredients to their formulas that may alter the overall aroma of the topical cream. For example, if a cooling cream contains menthol, the strong menthol smell may overpower the other ingredients' scents.

If you dislike certain smells, you may want to avoid purchasing a topical cream that contains those ingredients.

Reviews

Customer reviews say a lot about a product's quality and effectiveness. If a CBD cream for pain has mainly positive reviews, you can generally trust that it is likely to also work well for you. If it has a mix of positive and negative reviews, it may still be worth a try.

However, if a CBD lotion has mainly negative reviews, you may want to look elsewhere for a more reliable product.

Do CBD Creams Help with Pain Relief?

Before discussing the health benefits that CBD salves and creams can produce, we should note that researchers are still determining the exact effects CBD has on your body. Like other natural healing or relieving products, most CBD salves do not explicitly state any health claims on their labels. Likewise, the Food and Drug Administration has published only limited health information about cannabidiol.

With that said, a few studieshave found that cannabidiol-infused cream may provide relief for certain types of pain, including:

• Arthritis-related pain
• Nerve pain
• Jaw pain

This research has also found that topical CBD creams offer better pain relief than ingestible ones because users can target the product’s ingredients to a specific problem area.

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• 5 Best CBD Oil Brands For Sale in 2021

Types of Topical CBD Products

You can find many topical cannabidiol products on the market, but the most common options come in the form of a lotion, cream, or salve.

Lotions

CBD lotions resemble the body lotions you probably have in your medicine cabinet. These skincare products are thinner than salves or balms, so you can apply them over large areas with ease. Most customers use cannabidiol lotions to hydrate their skin rather than to relieve pain.

Creams

CBD creams are slightly thicker than lotion and have a similar density and texture to yogurt. Topical cream tends to have a higher concentration than lotion, and many customers use it to relieve dry skin and mild pain.

Salves

Salves tend to be more waxy and oily than lotions, and most people use them for small, localized pain areas such as their knees, elbows, neck, or lower back.

How to Use CBD Creams for Pain

Most CBD salves include instructions about the best ways to apply them to your skin. Some companies recommend gently massaging the product in, while others suggest spreading a light layer evenly across the problem area.

Like any new skincare product, you should patch-test a small amount on your skin before applying it to a larger area. If you are using the product to relieve pain or eczema, you will want to make sure it will not produce a reaction that could worsen your ailment.

Cooling Creams vs. Warming Creams—Which One to Choose?

Depending on the type of pain you are experiencing, you may decide to purchase a cannabidiol cream that produces cooling or warming sensations when applied to your skin. Most health professionals recommend heat therapy for muscle pain or stiffness and cooling treatment for acute injuries, inflammation, and swelling.

To determine the best option for you, think about which sensation would feel more comfortable in your pain area. Similarly, if you have found success with heating or cooling treatments in the past, you may want to purchase a CBD product that mimics those effects.

Are CBD Creams Safe to Use?

Topical CBD products are generally safe to use when used correctly, and typically do not produce any side effects. However, U.S.-grown hemp products tend to be safer and more reliable than imported options.

The 2018 Farm Billestablished a regulatory framework for hemp production in the U.S. Hemp plants need to contain no more than 0.3% THC, undergo frequent sampling and testing, and adhere to state-level guidelines for potency and production.

Infrequently, users experience mild side effects from CBD, such as:

• Tiredness
• Diarrhea or upset stomach
• Loss of appetite

If you have any recurring or chronic health conditions, you may want to talk with your doctor before beginning a cannabidiol treatment.

However, the majority of users do not notice any adverse side effects after using a cannabidiol topical.

How Much Do CBD Creams Cost?

High-quality CBD cream products can cost anywhere from $30 to $100. A product's price often depends on factors such as its size, potency, and additional ingredients.

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• Best CBD Oil for Pain Relief and Inflammation: Top 6 Brands of 2021

What Do People Use CBD Lotions For?

Many customers use CBD creams for pain relief. Some use these products to relieve more general aches and pains, while others apply cannabidiol cream to minimize:

• Jaw pain
• Joint pain
• Nerve pain
• Back pain

Customers also use hydrating CBD cream to help with conditions such as dry skin or eczema. Additionally, some people use CBD lotion because of its calming, relaxing scent that can relieve mild stress and anxiety.

Whether you decide to add a CBD pain cream to your daily skincare routine or bring it out for pain relief during seasons of itchy skin or bothersome joint pain, you can't go wrong purchasing this natural, effective healing product.

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*This article is provided by an advertiser. Statements made are not meant to offer medical advice nor to diagnose any condition. Any studies cited here may be preliminary, and may or may not be peer reviewed, and may or may not have sufficient participants to be statistically relevant. Anecdotal accounts should not be taken as scientific results. Products discussed in this article are not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease. The FDA does not evaluate dietary supplements. Consult your doctor about possible interactions, allergies, and if you are considering using a natural and/or dietary supplements for any condition. Individual results will vary.