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From January 11th natural hair care brand Mielle Organics, popular for its Pomegranate & Honey leave-in conditioner and other bestsellers, will join P&G Beauty, the company behind Always, Crest, Pantene and many other brands you know. According to a release on the news, Mielle Organics will continue to be led by founders Monique and Melvin Rodriguez, who will serve as the brand’s CEO and COO, respectively, and operate as an independent subsidiary within the P&G Beauty family. The news comes after a whirlwind of controversy earlier in the year surrounding Mielle’s best-selling Rosemary Mint Scalp & Hair Strengthening Oil.
In case you weren’t following, on December 29th, TikToker Alix Earle included Scalp Oil in a video roundup of her favorite products of 2022. The video now has more than five million views, 500,000 likes and thousands of comments. Many longtime fans of Mielle Organics weren’t too thrilled that the video went viral, fearing that the brand’s increased visibility to a white influencer’s audience could result in a product shortage for the black customer base it was originally created for.
Many black women flocked to Earle’s comments section and other social media platforms to discuss the future availability of the brand and its products. Some have claimed that the Rosemary Mint Scalp & Hair Strengthening Oil has already sold out at major retailers like Amazon and Target (although it appeared to be in stock at both retailers and the brand’s websites at the time this story was published). Although Earle’s video was not an advertisement created by Mielle, the incident reminded many of SheaMoisture’s 2017 “Hair Hate” commercial, in which many attempted to equate the hair discrimination faced by black people with frizzy and curly hair with that they just don’t like their own hair texture or color. Critics of the commercial pointed out that it appeared to publicly illustrate the brand’s focus on a market outside of the black community, while pushing aside its primary fan base, black women and their unique hair issues.
In the case of Mielle, some commenters also feared the brand would reformulate the beloved product to better meet the needs of customers with smoother hair textures, especially if the brand were acquired by a larger company. In response, Mielle released a statement on her Instagram page, assuring fans there were no plans to change the rosemary-mint oil formula. That was on January 2nd. Nine days later, news broke that Mielle would become a part of P&G Beauty.