This week, I did a lot of thinking about about celebrities and internet stars endorsing products. In particular, the product I see the most on Instagram is a product called SugarBear Hair, a brand of gummy vitamins that is advertised to make your hair shinier and healthier. Most of the Kardashian/Jenner family have expressed their support of this company, as well as a lot of other influential celebrities such as Vanessa Hudgens and Emily Ratajkowski. Additionally, a few people that I know personally (who, admittedly, have a larger following than I do by far) have advertised them as well.
From a consumer standpoint, its quite obvious that SugarBear Hair has completely blown me away by their marketing reach. They were seemingly a small, unknown company until they started to get the support of celebrities with 20+ million followers. Now, they have a hefty 1.3 Million Instagram followers. Not only that, but upon reading the comments of these posts, people claim to be placing orders or intending to place orders after viewing the post, even on posts of way smaller accounts.
So, naturally, after reading more about all of this buzz, I wanted to know if these vitamins actually work. Unfortunately, the friends of mine who endorsed them or received them as a gift didn't take them regularly or long enough to notice any difference. So instead, I read about it in the news. As a disclaimer, the only sites that did trials of the vitamins were news sites such as E! and Marie Claire, so I can't say for sure whether or not they were endorsed by SugarBear Hair. In all honesty, articles that end in "...and here's what happened!" don't merit a lot of trust from me, but the results seem generally the same across the board. On the three sites that I read, the participants who took the vitamins twice a day (as the instructions state) and for 30 days or more actually noticed their hair growing faster and shinier. In one example that didn't show good results, the participant ate two bottles of the vitamins in a week and a half (more than you're supposed to, and subsequently she ran out before the 30 days) because "they tasted so good" and didn't see any results.
Generally, when seeing posts about the vitamins, the caption generally always says something about how they taste like candy. In one of the articles I read, a participant mentioned how they lack that "chemical aftertaste" that other chewable vitamins have. This is what makes me the most skeptical, that something that tastes so good could have actual real results. So, I found an article (Buzzfeed) where a lab broke down the gummies and found what was in them.
According to the lab, the gummies received an A-grade rating for having the right amount of vitamins and nutrients to compensate for nutrient deficiencies for hair growth. However, they also found that the amount of  7 of the 11 ingredients were off by 20%. Presently, it's allowed for them to have these off numbers (even though many consumers want the FDA to crack down on this). Another finding from this lab is that the vitamins have high levels of lead. A double dosage per day (the instructed dosage) has 0.38 micrograms of lead, and the daily allowance, which is on the high side, is 0.5 micrograms. If someone takes more than two per day, they automatically go over the amount. It won't have any horrible effects unless someone consumes 3+ every day for years, but this still raises a red flag for me.
All in all, from a marketing standpoint, SugarBear Hair has it all figured out. They have reached out to the Kardashians (often considered the "ultimate celebrities") while they are still such a young company. Not only them, they have also reached the ranks of Disney Channel stars, models, YouTubers, Instagram stars (male and female alike). To me, it sounds like they have reached just about every demographic of females aged 13-29, and even a few males in this age range (such as Zachary Domingo, a makeup artist made popular by Instagram). Not only do they have that large reach, but they also seem to have a product that really works when taken correctly. After doing all of this research, my skepticism has declined a little towards celebrities endorsing this product. While I won't buy it myself (three bottles is $84), I won't feel so bad for the people who will buy it.