Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Curl Wizard Site Closing Effective June 1, 2012


Effective June 1, 2012, the Curl Wizard site will become inactive and we will no longer be offering hair analysis services WITH PRODUCT RECOMMENDATIONS.

And no, we will not be leaving you in the dark about what products are good for your type of hair, either! Please take a moment to read on.

This has been such a wonderful service for both us and for our clients. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to our curly friends all over the world who have taken the time to let us know what a benefit our hair analysis service has been to them.

Over the past several months, however, we have noticed a rapid acceleration in product changes as the amount of acquisitions of small, independent product manufacturers by large beauty industry corporations has sharply increased. Several products that we have recommended since we launched the service in 2010 have been re-formulated since then. It has become increasingly difficult for us to keep on top of this and change our profile information to reflect the increasingly rapid changes.

The amount of effort to maintain the product profile information aside, however, what has us concerned going forward is, as more and more large beauty industry corporations take over the small, independent product manufacturers, the more rapidly the product recommendation profiles we are providing will become “stale.” The large corporations like to make products more profitable and the best way to do that is to re-formulate a product with cheaper—and not necessarily better—product ingredients. It is our belief that we are looking at a rapid increase of this trend over the next several years.

It is one thing for us to provide product recommendations in good faith that the products will be successful for our clients over the long haul. We know there is always a chance a company will re-formulate their products and we are quite upfront about that. However, in all conscience, we cannot continue to provide a paid service that we cannot guarantee will provide our clients stable and reliable information long-term.

To that end, while the hair analysis service itself will still be available on Live Curly Live Free, we have opted to discontinue the product recommendation profiles on Curl Wizard effective June 1 and have instead created boards at Pinterest that include free product recommendations, curly hair information, curly hair articles, pictures, etc. In keeping with our philosophy that the Live Curly Live Free name itself is and should always remain “brand-neutral,” the boards are under the Curl Whisperer name: Pinterest - the Curl Whisperer.

In that way, it will be easier for us to both maintain the integrity of the product considerations we make available and also to give our clients an easy way to check on changes to those product recommendations.

Again, thank you so much for your kindness, your suggestions and your support. We look forward to continuing to help women everywhere on their personal journey of curly hair freedom.

The Live Curly Live Free team