Diamonds. Live resin. Distillate. You see those words on cannabis labels all the time, OTV's included. Here's live resin vs distillate vs THCa diamonds in plain English, and which one is in what you're holding.
First: all three are concentrates
Flower is the plant. A concentrate is what you get when you pull the good stuff out of the plant: cannabinoids like THCa, plus terpenes, the compounds behind the smell and taste. How you pull it out, and what you keep, decides what you end up with.
Want the full story on smell and taste? Our terpene guide covers it.
Distillate: built for purity
Distillate is cannabinoid oil refined by distillation. Heat the oil under a vacuum and different compounds come off at different temperatures. A patent for one of these processes notes that under vacuum, most terpenes distill out before the cannabinoids do. Separate them and you're left with a concentrated cannabinoid oil. (Source: US Patent 9,649,349)
The trade off: the flavor leaves with the terpenes. That's why distillate products often get terpenes blended back in. The same patent describes exactly that step: blending the cannabinoid distillate back together with terpene oil.
Clean. Concentrated. Flavor added on purpose.
Live resin: built for flavor
Live resin starts with fresh plant, frozen after harvest instead of dried and cured. The goal is to keep the chemical profile of the living plant. Fresh plant has to be frozen, or it risks growing mold. (Source: Cannabis Science and Technology, 2023)
Why go through all that? Drying costs you aroma. In a 1996 study, researchers compared fresh and air-dried cannabis buds. Drying knocked out far more of the light, bright monoterpenes than the heavier sesquiterpenes, and the amount of aromatic oil they could collect dropped about 31% after one week of drying. It kept falling in storage. (Source: Journal of Natural Products, 1996)
Live resin skips a lot of that loss. Cannabis Science and Technology puts it plainly: live resin products have more monoterpenes than extracts made from cured cannabis.
Fresh plant in. Fresh plant flavor out.
THCa diamonds: the crystals
Give a THCa-rich extract the right conditions and the THCa crystallizes out of it. One patent on the process describes THCa crystals forming and settling to the bottom of the container over 12 hours to several days. What's left behind is a liquid that's richer in terpenes. (Source: US Patent Application 2020/0102283)
That's what "diamonds" means on a label: crystallized THCa. Not a gemstone. Not a vibe. A crystal.
One more thing. THCa isn't THC until heat gets involved. Our THCa vs THC guide explains that part.
A few more label words
- Concentrate: Any product made by pulling cannabinoids and terpenes out of the plant. Distillate, live resin and diamonds all count.
- Cured: Plant that was dried and aged after harvest. Most flower you buy is cured. Live resin skips this step.
- Infused: Flower with concentrate added. Our prerolls are infused: flower plus concentrate plus diamonds.
- Terpenes: The aroma compounds. Fresh plant has more of the light ones, which is the whole point of live resin.
So what's in your OTV product?
- Prerolls: Every OTV preroll is a 2g infused preroll: flower + concentrate + THC diamonds, diamond-coated on the outside. The sparkle you see? That's the diamonds.
- Vapes: Our 3g disposables run on THCa distillate with live resin terpenes. Distillate brings the cannabinoids. Live resin terpenes bring the strain flavor. Screen, high and low power modes, USB-C charging.
- Gummies: Our 15mg gummies are infused with live resin.
Is one better than the others?
Wrong question. They do different jobs.
Distillate is about concentration. Live resin is about flavor. Diamonds are about crystallized THCa. None of those words gives you a number, and none of them tells you how a product will feel for you.
The word on the label tells you how it was made. The lab report tells you what's actually in it.
The short version
Distillate: refined cannabinoid oil, often with terpenes added back for taste. Live resin: made from fresh frozen plant to hold on to the aroma. Diamonds: crystallized THCa. Want the numbers? Check the COA.
Shop diamond-coated prerolls · Shop OTV vapes
21+ only. Do not drive or operate machinery after use. Keep out of reach of children and pets.