Organic wick, nichrome coil, ceramic core, intact terpenes. Select gets into details.

To understand just how obsessive Select can be about the quality of its vaporizer cartridge components is like admiring the fit and finish of a fine car, or nerding out over an Oscar film. If you really get down into it, there’s a level of craftsmanship that’s not for the casually curious.

But for one of California’s elite cannabis brands, hardware is just the half of it.

You can’t have a great vaporizer without great oil.

Select has its own standards for making that, too. The premium oils within Select’s universal/510-thread battery vaporizer cartridges represent years of experience and experimentation, precision fine tuning, and honing.

“It’s not just the cartridge,” says Cameron Forni, president and co-founder of the Select brand. “The tech is one piece, but it’s really a synergy of things coming together, the quality of the oil. Our testing for pesticides is revolutionary because it doesn’t allow us to buy contaminated plants in the first place.”

Putting the Select in ‘selective.’

Only 20% of California plants that Select tests meet the company’s standards for use. That is not a typo: Forni says 80% of all the cannabis plants that Select tests in the California marketplace—and they’ve tested a lot, more than 3.2 million pounds—is rejected for pesticides and other contaminants.

[SEE ALSO: How to use an oil cartridge vaporizer pen]

That’s not always the fault of cultivators. Grows close to fruit orchards and contaminated processing equipment can sometimes contribute to a failed test. It’s a tough reality that Select has navigated mindfully in its quest for superior quality.

Terpenes never had it this good.

And part of that obsession is preserving as much of any particular plant strain’s natural cannabinoid profile as possible. That means not stomping on the terpenes.

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Terpenes are compounds found across the plant kingdom that give individual fruits, flowers and other plant-based parts their unique flavors and aromas. And when you subject them to the same processes required to extract cannabinoids THC and CBD, they can get bruised, battered, mixed in and muddled.

So Select gently pulls out the terpenes first, sets them aside and re-introduces them after the cold-wash extraction process. The result is an oil that is truer to the plant’s natural flavor-profile expression—and unique to Select. Every strain truly has its own unique flavor profile, all at a high degree of quality.

“It really results in a beautiful, tasty oil with no harshness and a smooth exhale,” Forni says.

More than the sum of its superior parts.

So let’s zoom in for a moment on the hardware—another dimension where Select is separating itself in the booming vape market.

The hard-density clear plastic tip and tank are what you see and feel first, but what you’ll soon come to rely upon is the consistent, controllable draw that’s quick, discreet and easy to measure for the life of the cartridge. That’s thanks to a few things: An organic cotton wick, a ceramic heating core, and a nichrome heating element.

The sum of those parts is the absolute cutting edge in componentry, for reasons probably too nerdy to really get deep down into. Well, unless you’re the president of the company.

“There’s no bleach in the cotton,” Forni says. “And the spread fiber structure is the perfect structure for distributing viscous oil.”

See? Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

The core of any Select experience: the core.

As for those nichrome heating coils and ceramic cores, Forni says they picked up on that combo while attending professional vaporizer contests going back a few years now. All the winning professional designers used it. At that point there was no going back.

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“Four years and nine revisions later,” Forni says, “we finally got to a point where we feel very, very confident that we have the best product on the market.”

With a less-than 1% return rate — this, despite a “Nordstrom’s like” returns policy — Forni believes that Select hasstruck the perfect balance of quality oil and elegant hardware that the market is just beginning to discover.

And Select is hardly done innovating.

“More sleek designs and more smart devices are coming into the new age,” he says.

[Product(s) named in this story are registered under California license CDPH-T00000116]