What Exactly Is the Jetty Dablicator Oil Applicator? A Complete Guide to Precision Cannabis Oil

By Adam Tschorn

Silhouette-wise, the Jetty Dablicator™ Oil Applicator is sleek, bordering on stylish — as if a high-end fountain pen and tube of lipstick had a lovechild.

Function-wise the stainless steel-tipped oil applicator is a multi-tasking tool; a portable, pocketable one-stop replacement for both hot knives and messy syringes that delivers precise doses of cannabis concentrate with a twist of the wrist and push of a plunger. 

If you’ve just seen someone break out the Dablicator at a party for the first time, deftly dispensing dabs all around like a hostess icing cupcakes, you might have questions like: “What exactly is that thing?,” “What can I do with it?” and “Where did it come from?”

If you like smoking, dabbing, or eating and are looking for a way to seriously — and stylishly — streamline your sesh, you’re probably asking some of those same questions. That’s why we’ve put together the following primer.

What Is the Jetty Dablicator Oil Applicator?

The Dablicator oil applicator is a patented cannabis oil applicator that dispenses measured amounts of decarboxylated oil through a stainless steel tip. It’s designed to give consumers more control over how much of the powerful product they’re using and where they’re putting it, whether that’s into a dab rig, onto a prerolled joint or bowl of flower or under the tongue.

Hardware-wise, it consists of three sections; a plastic plunger base, a BPA-free tank that holds one gram of liquid concentrate and a pointed stainless steel tip. The dose lines on the plunger, which are revealed with a clockwise twist, mark out 25 milligram doses, making the contents inside easy to measure and dispense.

Why the Dablicator Oil Applicator Was Created

The Dablicator origin story has its roots at Jetty Extracts where in 2014, the team at the then one-year-old company was trying to solve a familiar dabber’s dilemma.

“The Dablicator history started as a high-dea where [Jetty founders] Nate [Ferguson], Rob [Ferguson], and Ron [Gershoni] really wanted to find a better way to do dabs because at this point they were still dabbing off super hot titanium nails,” explained Alex Kemper-McCall, Brand Director at Jetty Extracts. “They thought ‘It would be really cool if you could make something that pushed the oil out and you can set it right on the titanium nail and dab with it.’ Syringes were around at the time but any time you put the plastic syringe next to a very hot titanium nail you’d have the risk of melting the plastic.”

“So they had this idea: ‘What if we made this new device that could dispense oil, that would be easier to use and had a metal tip so you could put it on a hot nail or banger and it wouldn’t melt anything?’ And the first iteration of the device was actually a jerry-rigged lipstick [tube].” 

Kemper-McCall said that the new device got a positive reception. “The dispensaries were really interested in it,” he said, “because it was different from a syringe.”

Dablicator vs. Syringe: What’s the Difference?

Which brings us to the big question: What are the differences? While both rely on downward plunger pressure to move oil through a narrow opening, and both have markings that help measure dosage, one of the biggest differences is how and when that dosage is measured.

Unlike a traditional syringe, which pulls the plunger back and queues up all the contents all at once, the Dablicator oil applicator’s dose is measured by twisting the applicator body to reveal just the desired dosage.

The result?

When the plunger is pressed, it dispenses only the “dialed-in” dose — and no more. With an old-school syringe, too much pressure or too little attention can easily result in too much oil all at once. Not only can this be frustrating and messy, given the potency of cannabis concentrates, it can also lead to accidentally overdoing it. 

The other big difference is the stainless steel tip, which makes it possible to apply the oil directly to the hot surface of a dab rig without risking plastic-tip meltdown. It also makes the Dablicator oil applicator vastly more versatile.  

How to Use a Dablicator Oil Applicator

A sesh utility player of sorts, the Dablicator oil applicator helps cannabis consumers do the following with a no muss, no fuss twist and plunge:

Dabbing: Obviously (it’s in the name after all!)

Topping flower: Use it to easily sauce the top of a bowl of your favorite flower for a more concentrated experience.

Infusing pre-rolls: Drizzle oil on the outside of a prerolled joint or lay a thin strip down the middle of a joint before twisting it up (a practice called “twaxing”). 

Refilling vape carts: Use the Jetty Dablicator oil applicator to refill designed-for-reuse vaporizer pen cartridges, which can be both a convenience and a cost-cutter. 

Cooking: Because the oil used in the Dablicator hardware is decarbed, use it as a sublingual or add it directly to all kinds of foodstuffs, or coffee (The dedicated Dablicator website even has recipe suggestions. Anyone up for super devilish deviled eggs?) 

The one thing you can’t do with the Dablicator oil applicator is refill or reuse it. But you can recycle it since the two different types of plastic parts and the metal tip are easily disassembled for tossing into your collection bin.

Why Precision Matters in Concentrates

The potency of concentrates makes them popular. But with that potency comes the responsibility to get the dosing right. (Take it from someone whose first dabbing experience willfully ignored all dosing advice and ended up imagining a T-Rex scratching at his window.) The twist plunger and dosage markings take guesswork out of the equation.

“In concentrates there’s never been a way to reliably dose. So yes, the Dablicator oil applicator solves that issue,” Kemper-McCall said. “But it also solves another issue that I think is an issue across all [cannabis] categories, which is that oftentimes consumers have to buy one product for one use case whether it’s a vape to vape with, flower to smoke or edibles to eat. This allows you to do all of those things with a single product and a single purchase. Kind of like a Swiss Army knife.”

He added that, within five years of launching the delivery system they invented in-house, that multifunctionality made the Dablicator oil applicator a hit not just with consumers but other brands as well. “We’d been selling [the device] in small amounts to [other] brands to fill [themselves] but we weren’t really putting any effort behind it until we got one pretty big order in 2019,” he recalls.

“That was sort of the impetus to say ‘Oh, there’s a real opportunity here to bring this hardware across the country and internationally outside of the Jetty portfolio.’” Today, he says the Dablicator oil applicator is used by another 60 brands and companies across 30 markets which includes 26 U.S. states, Argentina, Australia, Canada and Spain.

As for the Jetty Extracts branded Dablicator oil applicators, you can currently find those in California and New York, with each one containing one gram of solventless live rosin (CA, with NY coming soon!) or High THC (NY).

Now, next time you see a solventless Dablicator oil applicator out in the wild — at a party or on a dispensary shelf — you’ll know the whole story behind the hot-knife problem-solver that ended up becoming a category-spanning multi-function tool.