Long, healthy mermaid hair – that is something that many women would like to attain. When I heard about the mermaid hair challenge I was curious about what it is and did some research. Here is what I found.
The mermaid hair challenge is a 12-week challenge with the aim to grow longer hair by taking hair vitamins every day. The hair supplements include certain vitamins like Biotin as well as some trace minerals and plant powders that are meant to support hair growth.
However, the company that introduced the mermaid hair challenge, uses MLM. I actually found a few reasons why it might be a bad idea to take the challenge with this company, so let’s have a closer look.
What is the 12-week mermaid hair challenge?
Maybe you have seen posts on social media of before and after pictures of the mermaid hair challenge. If not, type a quick search into google and you will find hundreds of social media posts that praise the vitamins. They claim that by taking these vitamins, your hair can grow enormously within 3 months.
The hair supplement includes Vitamins like Vitamin A and Biotin as well as a few trace minerals and plant powders. You are supposed to take two of these vitamin tablets each day.
According to what I have found, you could say the mermaid hair challenge is kind of a marketing strategy to acquire long-term customers and distributors.
On the company’s websites, you find that they suggest you enroll in an auto-ship option for the time of the challenge. Afterward, they offer you a “loyal customer membership” which also includes monetary incentives to keep you on the auto-ship and buying their products.
Furthermore, they (and distributors on social media) encourage you to become a distributor for them, which means that you are supposed to sell their products for them. This is often marketed like a get-rich-quick-scheme, suggesting that the participants will be able to reach financial freedom if they work for this company.
Is the mermaid hair challenge part of MLM?
When you research the mermaid hair challenge you come across many forums in which it is discussed if this challenge is part of MLM. So I tried to find out what this means.
Legal note: The information I give here is what I found doing some research. It is not advice against buying from or interacting with that company. You should of course do your own research to get an idea and make a decision yourself.
MLM means multi-level marketing and is the same as a sort of pyramid selling and network marketing. The pyramid scheme refers to the way this system works. It basically means that the owners of the company and a very few people on the top get very rich by making a lot of people on the bottom pay upfront costs and make losses.
More than 99% of people who join MLM companies actually lose money, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s website.
And because of how many people make a loss on the bottom of the system by paying for products of the company from their own pockets, the owners can make millions or billions of dollars. Technically, the MLM-business model depends on the failure of the vast majority of its participants.
There are a few ways to tell that the mermaid hair challenge is linked to such a MLM-company.
If you look for the company online you quickly notice that there are a lot of replicated websites of the original site. These sites belong to “independent distributors” and can mostly be found on other domains, subdomains of the original website or even on subdomains of totally different companies’ websites. These replicated websites are typical for MLM companies.
But this is not the only hint. If you actually click on the information about how to become part of this system on these sites, you can find pages and contracts in which they state themselves that they do multi-level marketing (MLM).
Furthermore, they also sell a lot of other products using the same selling techniques. This seems to be typical for MLM companies as well. Their products are not really the core of the company, but the MLM model is. The true sales pitch of these companies is to make potential participants believe that they can attain financial independence through participating (as an “independent distributor”).
In this article on business insider, you can read about how the company behind the mermaid hair challenge makes lots of money from products that are not scientifically proven to work, mainly health and beauty products. And how the vast majority of the participants actually spend more money than they make because of the costs to join and stay in the company (they say it’s 80+$ monthly). Only if the participants enroll new “loyal customers” and other “distributors”, they get a commission. But, according to business insider, that often does not work out.
If you are interested in how some MLM companies operate in general, I recommend you to have a look at this video by Anna’s analysis on Youtube, where she goes into depth about how a specific MLM company does business and how exactly their products are promoted on social media.
Does the mermaid hair challenge work?
There is no scientific evidence that the mermaid hair challenge vitamins work. Furthermore, it is difficult to find authentic reviews because it seems that many reviewers, who advertise the hair vitamins online, have a financial incentive to make it seem like the mermaid hair challenge vitamins do work because they are distributors of the company that sells the vitamins.
You can often guess if someone who advertises the vitamins works for the company as a distributor because they will mostly ask you to contact them (so they can sell you the product).
Furthermore, the extremely high biotin amount (10.000 mcg) in the hair vitamins does not have any scientific backing. It is a water-soluble vitamin and gets peed out if you take too much of it, so it most likely won’t have any adverse effects. But most doctors and nutritional scientists only recommend consuming or taking 30 mcg per day.
Generally speaking, hair vitamins can be helpful for your hair growth, but only if you are deficient in vitamins like biotin because you are not taking in enough vitamins through your diet. Otherwise, it most likely won’t do much for your hair.
And it definitely does not affect the genetic disposition of your hair. For example, some people just have very thin hair or a natural maximal hair length that just cannot be changed.
What is a better way to grow long mermaid hair?
You can of course do your own mermaid hair challenge that is more mermaid-worthy and does not support possibly unethical companies (at least that is my opinion). There are plenty of hair vitamins on the market.
But as I mentioned, hair vitamins only really make a difference if you are deficient in these vitamins. A possibly better solution might be to just eat a healthy diet or take a general multivitamin and nutrient supplement and maybe Omega-3 fatty acids to make sure you get all the nutrients necessary for you and your hair to be healthy.
Other than that, essential oil treatments and head massages could help. Some essential oils (and other possibilities) seem to actually stimulate hair growth. And of course, don’t forget to protect your hair from heat or anything that could damage it.
But it is important to keep in mind that not everyone has the same hair genetics. If your hair does not want to grow long, there is always the option to get extensions, if you really want to. Or simply to rock your beautiful short mermaid hair!
Legal disclaimer:
This post reflects my own opinion which is based on my own research. The information in this post is authentic to the best of my knowledge, and as such, could be prone to errors and the absence of some key information. The post was written for informative purposes and should not be perceived as professional advice in regards to health or finances.
