Water beads can be deadly to children and send thousands of them to the emergency room each year. Experts indicate that they should not be in homes where there are small children.
By Lauren Kirchner
Have you ever played with water beads? asks an ad on Amazon. “They slide easily, are soft and offer a surprisingly fun and addictive sensory experience for children of all ages… Fully tested and exceed all safety requirements for children’s toys.”
These “sensory” toys are small, expanding gel balls designed for children to squeeze, squish, and manipulate. They look sweet and can come in packs of thousands. Some start out as small as the size of sprinkles for cakes and cupcakes, and grow to the size of a marble when immersed in water. Others, originally the size of small grapes, grow to the size of a golf ball. They are made from superabsorbent polymers, a material that was first used decades ago for agricultural purposes and later for absorbent diapers. They are now often marketed as “non-toxic” toys and can be found in homes and schools across the country. Millions of packages have been sold.
However, data from emergency room visits, legal documents, medical information, incident reports from consumers and federal regulatory doctors, plus heartbreaking testimonies from parents, show that these toys are not safe. They are often bought for older siblings but these expanding beads have ended up in the stomachs, intestines, ears, noses and even lungs of curious babies and toddlers.
Recent testing by Consumer Reports on several brands of water pearls documented how large they can grow, in some cases dangerously so.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), it is estimated that between 2016 and 2022 about 7,800 emergency room visits were related to water beads, and it is almost certain that This figure underestimates reality. Inside the body, water beads can cause hearing loss, infections, intestinal obstruction requiring surgical removal of the intestines, airway obstruction that can lead to lung collapse, and even death. Experts indicate that the packaging and containers of many brands of water beads do not have the necessary safety warnings and do not mention any of these risks.
Meanwhile, there are legal documents and interviews that suggest that some water bead manufacturers and retailers were aware of these harms but chose not to recall their products from the market, decisions that safety advocates say have led to tragedies.
One of the first reported deaths linked to a water bead was that of a 6-month-old child in Pakistan, according to an article published in 2012 in a medical journal. Another medical report described how an 18-month-old girl in France died in 2019 after ingesting three. And in July, a 10-month-old girl named Esther Jo Bethard died in Wisconsin after ingesting water beads.
This death recently prompted a recall of one product in particular, a water bead activity kit called Chuckle & Roar, made by Buffalo Games and sold at Target. However, as of late September there were still other water beads made by the same company for sale elsewhere. And although some countries have banned water beads, they are still widely available in the United States and sold by dozens of manufacturers.
William Wallace, associate director of safety policy at Consumer Reports, says the federal government should ban or strictly limit the sale of all water beads and urges retailers and online platforms to stop selling them immediately. He also advises parents and teachers not to buy water beads and, if they already have them, to throw them away.
Other experts agree. “The risks cannot be ignored,” says Michael Alfonzo, MD, an emergency medicine physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine. “If you have a child under 3 years old, I wouldn’t have them at home.”
Insufficient warnings
In March 2022, when Haley Nickols saw her children’s water pearls scattered all over the floor, along with an upside-down box and a bench next to a high shelf where the pearls had been stored in ziplock plastic bags, and then in boxes, his first thought was disorder. The first thing she grabbed was the vacuum cleaner, and not a phone to call 911 or a poison control center.
It’s not that I haven’t been careful when I buy the water beads and store them. She and her husband, Willie, who live in Wisconsin, have five children, ages 8 months to 10 years old at the time, and she was mindful of the potential risks of all the things they brought into her home. The baby was not allowed to play with the water beads and the older children could only play with them under her supervision. Her Amazon listing for 30,000 small and 150 jumbo-sized pearls, sold by a company called Uwantme, also gave her no reason to worry. (This was not among the brands included in CR’s testing. The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
Today, the advertisement for the same product says “Eco-friendly and non-toxic materials.” He has a picture of a smiling baby in diapers playing in a large pile of already expanded water beads. Even the words “choking hazard” on the online ad didn’t make her hesitate, she says now, because, upon seeing them, especially in their dried form inside the package, they were so small.
Two days after finding the pearls scattered on the floor, her 8-month-old son, Deacon, woke up vomiting. At first he thought he had a stomach bug, but when he got worse and it seemed like he was becoming dehydrated, Nickols took him to the emergency room, he says. On the way, her husband called her to tell her that she should mention that she had found some small water beads in their dried form in Deacon’s mouth that day. She said she would, but in her mind she didn’t see the need. “Those aren’t dangerous,” she says she thought at that moment. “Even if he did eat them, he would just eliminate them in the bathroom.”
Doctors in the emergency room told Nickols that Deacon probably had a virus, he says, and that they should return home to wait. The doctors had never heard of water beads and didn’t seem concerned when she mentioned them, but they offered an x-ray as an option. Although the images weren’t entirely clear, there were indeed a couple of spherical shapes in her stomach and intestines, she says.
“The tone changed from ‘Why is this lady here?’ to ‘We can’t care for you here,’” she says. “What initially started as ‘maybe I could use some fluids,’ ended with an ambulance ride to Milwaukee, two hours away for emergency surgery.”
At Children’s Wisconsin Hospital, Deacon’s condition worsened. The doctors had to perform an exploratory laparotomy, an abdominal operation to investigate, and they found four pearls already expanded in his intestines, although initially they had only seen two on the x-ray. They checked his intestines but when they found nothing else, they closed the incision. However, the next day he started vomiting again. Haley suggested an ultrasound and they found another pearl they hadn’t seen before. It was then that doctors performed a second surgery, also discovering an infection and an abscess at the site of the first obstruction. Six inches of intestine had to be removed, he says.
After several procedures and more than a week in the hospital, Deacon returned home. Haley says Deacon, now 2 years old, has digestive problems due to the part of his intestine that was removed and sometimes gets hives that they can’t explain, but he is meeting his growth goals.
Nickols says she feels she was misled by the water beads ads, especially when compared to products like laundry detergent capsules or medicines, the dangers of which are now well known. “If she had walked into the room and seen a bottle of Tylenol lying all over the floor and we had taken several pills out of her mouth, we would have gone to the emergency room immediately.”
Medical mysteries, damage that manifests slowly
The Nickol family’s experience was hell, but at least Deacon had two things going for him: Someone had seen the water beads in his mouth, and some of them showed up on an x-ray. Other babies have not had the same fate, which has made their medical experiences even more complicated.
A very big problem is that the pearls are very small when dry, especially right after taking them out of the package. Even if handled carefully, pearls can fall, scatter, and roll everywhere. They can be hidden under furniture, in wall baseboards, and in carpets. A curious crawling baby may find one and eat it, even months or years after someone last used them. For this reason, parents who take a child to the emergency room may not even know or think to mention that their child could have swallowed one of these beads.
Another problem: While the risk of suffocation is immediately apparent, intestinal obstruction is not, says James Dodington, a doctor of pediatric medicine at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital in Connecticut. “Someone can ingest them and intestinal obstruction occurs after a long time,” he says. “Those are the things that keep us up at night the most.”
Finally, when a symptom like vomiting occurs, diagnosing the obstruction is difficult, due in part to the material the beads are made of: a gel that is nearly invisible on an x-ray and is sometimes even difficult to see on a ultrasound. An endoscope, which is a small camera inserted down the throat, is not long enough to cover the entire area of the intestines to locate the pearls.
Therefore, many times the only way to diagnose the problem is through exploratory surgery to check the intestine area, a procedure that is invasive and traumatic for anyone, especially a baby.
Dr. Alfonzo says that in his pediatric emergency department they see many children and babies who have accidentally eaten something; Thats nothing new. However, water beads pose a new challenge because of how unpredictable they can be.
“Something like a coin has a fixed size, so you know the areas where it’s going to cause problems, since there are certain areas in your digestive system that are naturally narrow,” he says. However, water beads “are unique because their size can vary and they can expand in the wrong place at the wrong time, causing serious damage.”
CPSC incident reports, available to the public at SaferProducts.gov, are also filled with stories of parents whose children became ill in mysterious ways, then discovered they had water beads growing on different parts of their bodies. Like the case of a 3-year-old girl who had a mysterious ear infection and then started having seizures, according to a grandfather’s report. The report notes that a water bead had somehow lodged in her inner ear, and had grown so large that it destroyed her eardrum. Even though the pearl was surgically removed, the con Seizures continued for months, according to the report. The family mentioned in the report that they had no idea where the water pearl had come from.
Parents spread the warning
When Ashley Haugen’s 13-month-old daughter Kipley woke up vomiting violently in her Texas home one July morning in 2017, Ashley had no idea what was happening. At the hospital, the vomiting worsened; The medicine didn’t work and the exams and imaging tests revealed nothing. The way she learned that water beads were the cause was when emergency surgeons removed fragments of them from Kipley’s small intestine after exploratory surgery. Ashley felt her heart stop beating when she realized they were the water pearls she had bought as a birthday gift for her oldest daughter three months earlier. However, she never saw Kipley near them and still doesn’t know how she got them.
Haugen created a website and nonprofit organization called “That Water Bead Lady” with the goal of warning other parents and pediatricians about the dangers of these seemingly harmless toys. She indicates that the doctors who initially treated Kipley in the hospital ruled out the possibility of her having long-term effects, especially when reading that the package states that it is a “non-toxic” product. But several years later, Kipley’s pediatrician diagnosed him with toxic encephalopathy (a type of brain injury), saying it was likely due to the toxic ingredients in the water beads. According to her pediatrician, Kipley has experienced delays that will likely affect her for the rest of her life.
Haugen was the first to speak on a parent panel discussing water beads with the CPSC at a May 2023 meeting. She told commissioners she thought that when manufacturers emphasized parental supervision, the proper storage and cleaning, were diverting attention from their own responsibility.
“Kipley wasn’t allowed to play with the water beads, the girls had separate play areas, we made sure there was an adult supervising, and we researched the product,” she said. “We did everything right to keep our daughter safe and she still suffered serious consequences.”
Haugen has made it her full-time job to warn parents about the risks of water beads, and to help those whose children have been affected. She also compiles medical studies and prepares reports for emergency room doctors and poison control center staff so they can quickly become informed and informed about this unique new problem. She says she has witnessed parents successfully petition school districts to ban them from classrooms. And furthermore, she has formed a support group for affected families, many of whom are in constant contact, and she uses social media to spread her message.
In November 2022, Haugen’s account was mentioned in a TikTok video that showed a desperate mother, Folichia Mitchell, asking viewers of her video to pray for her then 9-month-old daughter. Kennedy was fighting for his life in a Maine hospital after he somehow ingested a water bead that came out of a kit Mitchell had purchased for his 8-year-old son, who has autism spectrum disorder, according to the complaint. filed by the family in June 2023. It was claimed that just a single bead of water, when ingested, had apparently triggered a series of medical nightmares: intestinal obstruction, sepsis, infections, a ventilator and, he told commissioners of CPSC, blood transfusions and multiple surgeries, to first remove the pearl and then approximately 6 inches of intestine, which had suffered irreparable damage.
While Kennedy was in the hospital, Haugen mobilized his followers on social media to get information to contact Mitchell. When they were able to get in touch, Haugen sent Kennedy’s doctors medical information and case studies she had collected. Kennedy survived. He was able to return home with a feeding tube, according to the complaint. Although he had to learn how to eat and crawl again, but now he has recovered, says Mitchell.
Haugen and Mitchell are now part of a small but growing group of parents whose children have suffered serious harm, including death in one case, related to water beads, and are also fighting for change. In the absence of regulations from the government and clearer warnings from manufacturers, they themselves have taken it upon themselves to spread the warning among other parents, doctors and poison control centers. Additionally, they have met with the CPSC to request clearer, more concise warning labels or, at best, a complete ban on the product.
“If I had seen “possible organ damage” on the warning label, I would have bought something else,” Mitchell says now. “There are so many options for toys that these don’t need to exist.”
Before the Chuckle & Roar recall took place in mid-September, the CPSC had not handled recalls with water bead manufacturers in a decade. At that time the agency, in all cases, had mentioned the potentially fatal risks of ingesting them.
Meanwhile, Italy and Malaysia have banned the sale of water beads as toys, and government agencies in Canada, Ireland and New Zealand have issued warnings to parents about their risks.
In mid-September, the same day the Chuckle & Roar recall was announced, the CPSC issued a new warning about water beads. It recommended parents and caregivers keep them out of the reach of children under 3 years old, and told “daycares, camps and schools to avoid these products completely.”
CPSC Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric told CR in an interview that individual product recalls and public warnings are simply steps “on the path of what we’re trying to do” to eliminate the risks that companies face. water pearls represent for children.
“From my point of view, I think we need to re-examine the rules that apply to water pearls,” Hoehn-Saric says. This may involve “reviewing standards related to their size and consistency, and some people have proposed that they should be banned for children altogether.”
CR safety advocates urge the CPSC to act quickly. “Water beads are promoted as safe and sold as if there is nothing wrong with them, leading parents to unknowingly put their children at risk,” says CR’s Wallace. “The CPSC should ban water beads or at least put strong restrictions in place so they cannot be sold as children’s products. “Retailers and online platforms should stop selling them immediately and contact previous buyers to warn them of the risks.”
Wallace also recommends keeping water beads out of the home if children or adults with cognitive issues are present. “It’s not worth taking risks. “Water beads serve no useful purpose and there are much safer options for sensory play,” he says, pointing to foods that are digestible at room temperature, such as rice, beans, pasta or peas, as good alternatives.
Hidden dangers
Another person who saw Mitchell’s video on TikTok was Sara Gent, a mother of two in Florida. Recounting her experience during the CPSC meeting in May, she said she had a box of water beads at home, but after watching that video in late 2022, she threw them all in the trash. Or at least that’s what she thought.
Just a week after that, in December 2022, Gent had to take her 13-month-old son, Henry, to the hospital because he was vomiting blood and gastric fluids. According to his testimony, surgeons later removed a pearl of water from his intestines that, although invisible through an endoscope, X-ray and ultrasound, had grown to 2 inches in diameter.
Gent told CPSC commissioners that she still doesn’t know how the water pearl got to Henry, but suspects she ate it when she was little, in her dehydrated state. “They bounce and roll under the furniture, then shrink back to the size of a sprinkle, until they come into contact with the liquid again,” Gent told commissioners. “So when you have a bag with 50,000 of them, it’s almost impossible to keep a complete record of each one of them.”
When the Gent family brought Henry home from the hospital, they testify that they invited friends to come and help them check the floors, wall baseboards, furniture, and toys, looking for water beads. somehow they would have missed them. They found more than 50.
“Months later, I found three more among the moving parts of a toy that three people had gone through,” Gent told the CPSC. “They are still terrorizing our family.”
Haugen says he only stopped finding these tiny, hidden dried water beads after he replaced the floorboards throughout his house. Mitchell says she is in the process of buying a new house so she and her family can move out of the one where her daughter’s pearling accident occurred, because she is too worried that it could happen again. .
“It’s like glitter: It gets everywhere and you find it for years, no matter how much you clean,” Haugen says.
From the farm to the playroom
As a toy, rainbow-colored water beads are a relatively new phenomenon, but the magical-looking material they are made of is not. “Superabsorbent polymers” were first used by the Department of Agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s to help store water for plants and crops. In the decades that followed, some companies began experimenting with using the materials in consumer products such as diapers and feminine items.
Another common use for small superabsorbent polymer beads was as material for filling bases and centerpieces in flower shops. Pearls were both decorative and useful for storing water, which was then slowly released, feeding flowers and plants.
It was at a flower stall in London’s Camden Market that toy executive Ron Brawer says he first saw the colorful pearls, more than a decade ago. He bought some packages and took them home so his young children could play with them, and they were fascinated.
That was the seed of the idea for Orbeez, which hit the market in 2010. Brawer says he had sent samples to an outside chemical lab to simulate what would happen if the polymers were ingested, and the lab gave him good news: The beads would pass safely through the body without causing any serious damage.
In fact, whenever security questions came up at presentations and conferences, Brawer says he demonstrated his confidence in Orbeez by eating a couple of them on the spot. He estimates that he must have eaten a hundred in his lifetime, with no ill effects.
When CR interviewed Brawer, he seemed genuinely surprised to hear about young children whose serious injuries and deaths were linked to water bead incidents. Brawer says he left the toy industry years ago, and an international toy company called Spin Master bought the Orbeez brand in 2019 (Spin Master maintains Orbeez are safe, but did not respond to the inquiry.) s CR questions about how they test your security). “If there are kids today who have been hurt by these things, I’m obviously sorry to hear that,” Brawer says, adding that he didn’t know about problems like these when he oversaw the brand. “I wouldn’t have created this if I thought there was any chance of anyone getting seriously hurt.”
CR’s Wallace notes that the introduction of children’s water beads highlights serious deficiencies in the way the United States regulates product safety. “Our laws generally do not require that a new-of-its-kind product be shown to be safe before it is put on the market, even if it is for children,” he says.
Sales growth, little responsibility
At one time, Orbeez was synonymous with water beads, but the industry has grown as quickly and unexpectedly as its products. Toy company Buffalo Games and its Chuckle & Roar brand incorporated water beads into their sensory play bins and other tactile toys like sand and shredded paper.
Other companies sell them in kits to make your own “stress balls.” Several brands sell water beads in packages of thousands as “gel bullets” or “splatter balls” that are used in toy weapons, an activity that surely increases the risk of water beads being scattered around the house and in the garden. Orbeez has also expanded its line: It sells foot and hand “spa” kits, “sensory stations,” water bead painting kits, and “stress relief sets,” the latter aimed at getting kids to make beads. of water bounce “#bounce”.
The water beads market is difficult to quantify due to the number of brands selling products from abroad, and also because these products are often marketed as both toys and “base fillers” or other similar categories at the same time. (For example, names on a recent list were: “spa gel beads, kids sensory toys, bases, plants, wedding and home decor.”)
But a CR analysis of Amazon sales data shows that in a period of just two years (September 2021 to July 2023) packs of water beads were purchased approximately 3.4 million times.
The most popular version of Orbeez on Amazon (its “stress pack” containing 1,600 beads) was purchased nearly 48,000 times in two years. During the same time period, the most popular water pearl pack on Amazon, the Elongdi brand 50,000 pearl pack, was purchased more than 200,000 times.
Those sales figures come from just one retailer, Amazon. Several sellers also sell water bead toys on other large retail platforms, such as Target and Walmart. They are also sold through smaller retailers, such as an educator supply store called Lakeshore Learning, and are also repackaged as party favors on Etsy.
Liability for damage caused by water beads continues to be a challenge. Parents of affected children can try to file a lawsuit, of course, but the water bead industry presents difficulties in this regard. Many companies, especially those that sell through Amazon and other online platforms, are based abroad, making it difficult to take them to court.
Haley Nickols says she can’t file a lawsuit over what happened to her son Deacon because the Uwantme brand is in China; They can’t even find information to contact them. She sees this as a dangerous legal situation that brands selling on online platforms are taking advantage of, and the ones who lose out are consumers.
“There should at least be someone you can call,” Nickols says. “Basically, it’s the same as if you flew to China, bought the water pearls there and came back here, no one could be held responsible.”
CR contacted all of the companies mentioned in this article that make or sell water beads. Target spokesperson Emily Bisek said, “We express our deepest condolences to the families affected by these tragic incidents.” Hand2Mind CEO Rick Woldenberg said his company was not aware of any harm related to its water beads, but that he had recently decided to discontinue them for other reasons. Walmart said its Hello Hobby brand will no longer offer water beads and added that it is “reviewing other products” in the wake of the CPSC notice. Etsy said it was investigating the issues that have arisen over these products.
Spin Master, which sells Orbeez, did not respond to questions for this article, but has told CR in the past that Orbeez products “undergo rigorous safety testing” and should not be confused with other “copycat products.” Amazon and Elongdi declined to comment. Buffalo Games (which sells Chuckle & Roar toys), Dazmers, Joann, Jangostor, Lakeshore Learning, MarvelBeads, Supbec and Uwantme did not respond to requests for comment.
The Toy Association, an industry group, said consumers should follow age recommendations on product packaging and that when sold as toys, water beads are subject to safety regulations, while for other uses that are not toy related are not.
Warnings ignored, death without reason
On August 26, 2022, toy company Buffalo Games received an email from a mother in Las Vegas named Elissa Byer. She wanted the company to know that one of her Chuckle & Roar water beads had nearly killed her 18-month-old son James.
According to medical records, accidentally, and without his parents knowing, the little boy inhaled a small dehydrated bead that then, over two days, expanded in his airways, causing his left lung to collapse. Surgeons removed most of the pearl, Byer says, and it was recovered, although some remains may have remained. And if the bead had ended up an inch higher, doctors told him, it would have blocked both lungs and he could have died while he slept.
“I wanted to share our story because I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” Byer wrote to the company. He wanted “aspiration” added as an additional hazard on the package warning label. “We were lucky, but other children may not be lucky,” she wrote. “Never in a million years have I seen this threat.” The same day, he contacted Target, where he had purchased the toy, and told them the story as well.
Buffalo Games responded on August 30: “Thank you for contacting us,” the email said, “we are sorry to hear about your traumatic experience and are happy to hear that your 18-month-old son is safe.” Target refunded her the cost of the water bead kit, she says, and asked for more information, which she provided. As far as Byer could see, the warning labels were not changed.
Not even two months had passed, in October 2022, Folichia Mitchell, Kennedy’s mother, also bought a box of Chuckle & Roar water beads at a Target near her home. Kennedy’s daughter went to the hospital on November 1 and remained there for a month, fighting for her life, according to the lawsuit complaint against both companies.
Her TikTok video telling Kennedy’s story went viral later that month, a potential PR crisis for Target is why Mitchell believes the chain pulled that particular product from its shelves in November 2022. However, Buffalo Games did not immediately withdraw the product from the market, it did so until mid-September 2023, almost a year later. Target also did not inform past customers to get rid of the toy or take extra precautions.
Buffalo Games did not respond to CR’s request for comment. Target’s Emily Bisek said the company no longer sells Chuckle & Roar water beads and encourages people who purchased the recalled product to contact Target for a refund. However, the company did not respond to specific questions about James Byer or Kennedy Mitchell, or explain why it did not alert previous customers about the safety risks of water beads until the recall was filed in September 2023.
Injury attorney Daniel Mann calls this lack of action inexcusable, especially since Target has digital records on many of its customers and could have easily contacted them. “There’s no reason, in this electronic world we live in today, that this shouldn’t have happened,” he says.
And if they had, Mann says, they could have saved a baby’s life.
He represents Taylor and Tyler Bethard, who live in a small town in Wisconsin, not far from Haley Nickols. The Bethard family had five children; The youngest was a girl named Esther Jo. They bought the same Chuckle & Roar water beads from Target that Mitchell had, for his oldest son to use, who was entering kindergarten. They bought it in April 2022, when Taylor was pregnant with Esther Jo. She was born on August 28, 2022, two days after Elissa Byer first contacted Buffalo Games and Target to beg them to warn other parents about the risks posed by her water beads.
The Bethards didn’t know anything about that. They did not receive any notification from the manufacturer about an updated warning label, because there was none. They didn’t hear back from the store about a product alert or voluntary recall, because there wasn’t one. Ten-month-old Esther became ill on July 6, 2023 and developed symptoms that were similar to a stomach virus. Her mother found her dead in her crib the next morning.
Taylor testified to the CPSC that Esther died from ingesting water beads, although, as far as her parents knew, she had never played with them. The CPSC included reporting of Esther’s death in its announcement when Buffalo Games finally removed the water bead kit from the market in September 2023.
The Bethards will remember Esther Jo for her curiosity and wonder, for her blue eyes and curly red hair, and for the way she smiled and skipped dancing when her four brothers sang to her. Esther’s mother, Taylor, says talking about her death is extremely difficult but she has a message to share.
“Please spread the word to prevent this from happening to other children,” Taylor says. She believes that water pearls should not be sold to anyone who has children. “The ideal would be to ban them and not allow them to be marketed as children’s toys. If I had known the risks, I would never have allowed my older children to play with them. “I would never have had them in my house.”
The Chuckle & Roar water bead kits are no longer seen on Target.com, but they were still available on Amazon in late September. And many, many, many other brands of water beads are still on sale and continue to be purchased by parents, schools, summer camps, and daycares.
“I’m the warning sign they decided not to listen to,” Elissa Byer says now. She had warned Buffalo Games and Target about her son James’ story last August, just days before Esther was born and 10 months before Esther died.
Byer has joined Ashley Haugen and other affected parents in fighting to ban water beads. She says that every time they meet there are more. And she says that hearing the stories of what happened to her children, especially Esther’s story, has “lit a certain fire” in her. “We can’t stop, because this is not going to stop,” Byer says. “No one should “It would be losing your child for a toy.”
Correction: This article, originally published on September 21, 2023, was updated to clarify that the regulation of expandable materials is mandatory, not voluntary.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect the most recent information available to CPSC on emergency room visits related to water bead incidents.
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