YouTube’s algorithm helpfully leads from Malik’s video to dozens more, including one by India Batson, an even more prominent beauty YouTuber who's issued glowing DevaCurl recommendations in the past, including on the company's website. She put up a video expressing shock at the DevaCurl controversy on Tuesday afternoon that almost immediately garnered thousands of views, despite not having much new light to shed on the situation. ("I have not been taking this situation surrounding DevaCurl lightly," Batson wrote on Instagram. "I have seen your questions and messages of sheer panic. I have been calling influencers in the curly hair community trying to get to the bottom of this, reaching out to Devacurl personally and researching online to understand what is at the root cause.") Batson added that she has "asked the DevaCurl team to remove my images from their website," and said she would be "redoing my Amazon recommendations for my future videos on my channel," implying she'd no longer recommend DevaCurl products.Do you work at or know anything we should know about DevaCurl? Contact Anna Merlan at anna.merlan@vice.com or via VICE's SecureDrop.
Update, February 5:On their website, DevaCurl also issued a similar statement, which claimed that an "independent third-party toxicologist" had done testing on their formulas and had not found any "safety issues."Over two decades ago, DevaCurl was born from conversations with our consumers and from our salons and stylists about what they wanted and needed to embrace their curls. As a result, our community has grown to include millions of Devas around the world who use our products every day. All of our formulas are subject to rigorous and thorough testing to ensure our products meet strict internal quality assurance standards and regulatory requirements before they reach the market. We don’t speculate on why some people are attributing the challenges with their curls to our products. As part of our ongoing commitment to product safety and the satisfaction of our Deva Community, we are conducting additional testing with an independent party. We are committed to providing our customers with all the information they need to continue to use DevaCurl with confidence. We’ll be posting updates on our website, and we encourage our consumers to share their experiences with us at customercare@devacurl.com. We will go above and beyond to help anyone on their curl journey.
Because some of our community have recently asked more questions about some of our products we have conducted additional testing at the manufacturer and warehouse level. In addition, we worked with an independent third-party toxicologist to verify the safety of these formulas. All these tests verified there are no safety issues with our products.