By the time Dyson issued its first statement on September 9 regarding reports that its new $499 CameraJet electric toothbrush was malfunctioning, the technology giant had long lost control of the narrative.
A company known for its tightly choreographed communications machine waited seven days after the first reports emerged of its AI-powered toothbrush arriving dead, failing within 30 seconds, overheating, and leaking water into the battery before addressing the issue.
On September 9, Dyson's response appeared in The Verge after the publication inquired about the numerous customer complaints. Dyson Communications Manager Kaitlyn Coleman said, “We are aware that a small number of early batches of Dyson CameraJet products may have experienced a component issue. We are isolating those batches and are taking all the necessary steps to support our customers.”
Many people, particularly Dyson’s devoted 43K-strong Reddit forum r/dyson, found the statement vague and unhelpful. The fan-created community is made up of Dyson’s superfans—early adopters who are usually first to hit the “pre-order” button as soon as it goes live.
As a group that pores over every word Dyson founder and Chairman James Dyson says, and reads every bit of background and technical information it can find, many r/dyson members were frustrated that Coleman used ambiguous language, leaving the public to guess how many products constituted a “small” number, and whether the failed products were isolated to one country. And what was the “component issue”?
Timothy Coombs, a Senior Partner at the Center for Risk Communication and a Senior Research Fellow at the Arthur W. Page Center at Penn State who has researched and taught Crisis Communication for the last 30 years, told BeautyMatter that Dyson’s statement was a very odd response because the company chose to say very little to assuage its consumer base. Coombs said this type of non-response can be “very dangerous in these types of situations because you let other people control the story. And it's particularly odd because Dyson has a very strong brand community who expect communication from the company.”
By September 22, so many posts about the failed toothbrush had appeared in the r/dyson forum that the mods surveyed users about starting a megathread on toothbrush-gate, giving members a consolidated grief circle to express their disappointment.
“From a behavioral consumer perspective, when we think about uncertainty, I think it can sometimes be much more damaging than the bad news itself,” Andrew McDougall, Director of Beauty and Personal Care Insights at global market research firm Mintel, told BeautyMatter. “Because people kind of naturally start filling in the blanks themselves with their own kind of assumptions. So, what we have seen in the past, and what we'll probably continue to see in situations like this, is that people aren't necessarily looking for every technical detail. What they're really looking for is the confidence that the company understands the issue and knows who is affected, and has a clear kind of plan in place to address it.”
On September 1, Dyson threw a splashy, high-profile launch party in Paris to celebrate its first entry into the oral care category with the CameraJet, according to French publication Le Monde.
Dyson executives woke up on September 2 to Interesting Engineering, questioning the evidence behind Dyson's claim that CameraJet removed up to 69% more plaque than market-leading premium electric toothbrushes in hard-to-reach areas. Dyson said the figure comes from external testing, but the company has not publicly presented an independent clinical trial.
Just a day after the CameraJet official launch, the first negative consumer account of the CameraJet appeared on Trustpilot from a Great Britain–based reviewer: “Dyson toothbrush - broke immediately and Dyson won’t help.”
A canary in the coal mine for Dyson, that initial consumer complaint was followed by a growing number of similar reports from customers posting on Trustpilot, mirroring the reviewer’s disappointment with the product malfunction and lack of customer support.
By September 5, CameraJet failures hit Reddit, when users who had paid extra for overnight shipping started sharing their experiences, creating threads like “Widespread CameraJet Defects/Faults?” and “Dyson CameraJet return policy is ridiculous.”
As more complaints streamed into the r/dyson forum, one thing became clear: Dyson's handling of defective CameraJets became part of the complaint itself.
One r/dyson community member said, “For a $500 product from a premium global brand, the product failure is bad enough. What’s even more frustrating is how difficult it is to get a clear, consistent solution once something goes wrong.”
Another commenter said, “This is illegal under the [UK] Consumer Rights Act 2015. Within 30 days, you can request a full refund if the product is faulty,” and a different commenter suggested reporting Dyson to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). A different r/dyson community member said that, out of frustration, he had contacted James Fishler, President of Dyson’s US business, but that Fishler never responded.
Coombs said you have to imagine many of the people who rushed out and bought the CameraJet as soon as it was available are part of Dyson's brand community, and that up until now, these brand community members have been the ones posting unboxing and tutorial videos on social media and defending Dyson against negative comments.
“Well, now they [brand community] are going to be saying the exact opposite. They're going to be saying things like, ‘I spent all of this money, and they [Dyson] are not replacing it at this time.' These people will not be silent. They'll feel they have a right to complain. They spent $500 for a toothbrush that doesn’t work.”
By September 7, media members who had received the product from Dyson began reporting their own issues. Consumer Reports posted a video saying the product stopped working less than 24 hours after unboxing. The publication followed up with a full review later in the month, with the writer saying that when she used the CameraJet’s Auto-jet function, “water splashed all over my bathroom.”
The CameraJet hit US shelves on September 8, and The Verge published its report within 24 hours, citing user complaints of complete hardware failure within 20 to 30 seconds of first use due to water seepage. Since then, negative stories also ran in Allure and Inc.
Social listening platform Nectar analyzed nearly 3,800 posts about the Dyson CameraJet between September 1 and October 1, 2026, across all major platforms—Reddit, X, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok—for BeautyMatter. Week-over-week numbers show negative social chatter more than doubled from 10% during launch week (September 1-7) to 23.5% in the final week (September 25 - October 1), a +13.4 percentage-point rise, and that negative share first exceeded positive share on September 11, which coincided with when the CameraJet was pulled from sale in France over a battery defect.
When The Verge asked Dyson whether it had pulled the CameraJet from shelves, the company’s statement implied that retailers were out of stock because of global demand. The statement read: “We are seeing some shortages of supply as we are in the process of scaling up production.”
On September 11, French tech publication Numerama confirmed that Dyson had quietly stopped selling the CameraJet online and pulled inventory from French stores. When the publication asked whether Dyson was recalling the CameraJet, the company issued an official statement, doubling down on the global demand narrative and adding, "This is a localized incident affecting a small number of products."
The statement also said it was suspending sales but that no product recall was underway. “However, to ensure all our customers receive the experience they expect from a Dyson product, we have proactively and temporarily suspended sales of the product in France.”
Coombs said that when companies quietly pull products from the shelves and refuse to call it a recall, as Dyson did, it’s sometimes called a “stealth recall.”
“If and when the [stealth recall] comes to light, it looks really bad for the company because there's opacity to it, and the brand community can say the company is hiding something, which is not a good look for the company,” Coombs said. “Then you have the company denying the recall despite taking all the products off the shelves, but still refusing to call it an official recall.”
Italian newspaper Il Post reported on September 15 that Dyson’s CameraJet was no longer available in several countries, including Italy, France, the UK, and Singapore, and that Dyson had marked the CameraJet as sold out on its own site.
On September 21, Wired published “Dyson won’t say what’s wrong with its CameraJet Toothbrush,” in which Dyson again denied a recall. Liv Thomas, Dyson’s Head of Beauty Communications, insisted that the CameraJet was “experiencing strong demand globally” and “shortages of supply as we are in the process of scaling up production," according to the story.
As of September 28, r/dyson members had coined their own language for Dyson’s handling of the CameraJet, with one user calling the CameraJet “shadow canceled.”
By September 29, Dyson had stepped away from its original narrative. After initially attributing shortages to strong global demand and production scaling, Dyson said in a statement to Bloomberg that the device went out of stock everywhere because the company chose to isolate the affected inventory.
The company spokesperson also said to Bloomberg the CameraJet’s malfunction stemmed from a process issue in one production batch of jet tubes, creating a potential for water seepage that affected a small number of products. While this was the first time the company had given a reason for the CameraJet’s failure, it did not explain how it quantified a “small number of products” or where it shipped products from the affected batch.
In a statement to BeautyMatter, a Dyson spokesperson echoed the same statement verbatim that it had sent to Bloomberg, Allure, and Inc.
When BeautyMatter asked Coombs what Dyson should have done about the CameraJet PR nightmare, he said there is a concept in crisis communication called “stealing thunder,” which means that a company is the first to report a problem with a product, which Dyson did not do. “Obviously, the company knew about the product issues because consumers were talking to their customer service; they would have been the first to see the pattern,” Coombs said.
According to Coombs, Dyson knew it was a failed launch before anyone else, and they should have been the first to report it. “Their brand community needed to hear the company acknowledge the problem, admit they would be taking it off the market, and explain how they would deal with the issue now and in the future,” Coombs said. Doing so would have given Dyson narrative control and helped preserve trust with its most loyal consumers.
So why didn’t Dyson do this? Coombs said companies often hope the situation will get better without having to admit wrongdoing. “It comes down to risk aversion. People [companies] don't like to create risks and problems, and they don’t want to admit a risk or problem exists.”
By continuing to be opaque about what will happen to consumers who bought the faulty CameraJet (with some r/dyson members continuing to report difficulties obtaining responses or refunds as of publication), Coombs said the company is making the situation worse because “in a crisis, your brand community can be a burden to you. And that's what they [Dyson] did. They created a burden because usually their brand community is a buffer, a benefit. They're out there to help deflect and take a lot of the criticism and fight for the company online.”
The damage may also follow Dyson into its next CameraJet launch. “Instead of excitement, you’re going to have skepticism, and that’s not where you want to be,” Coombs said.
To McDougall, the bigger question is whether Dyson consumers feel heard, informed, and supported as the situation develops. “Dyson’s challenge isn’t just resolving the product issue. It’s maintaining confidence among consumers who have historically been some of its strongest advocates. The long-term impact will depend much less on the malfunction itself and much more on how effectively Dyson maintains that confidence going forward.”