Why Won't They Bring Back John Frieda Beach Blonde Spray?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a hottie from the mid-aughts in possession of ~effortless beach curls~ must be in want of copious amounts of John Frieda Beach Blonde Ocean Waves spray. Or so the widespread and fervid Internet longing for the now-discontinued product would indicate.

As someone who was not a mid-aughts hottie in possession of effortless beach curls (as evidence, here is a photo mid-aughts Callie enjoying the sea), I didn’t partake in the apparently commonplace John Frieda Beach Blonde Ocean Waves Spray hair ritual. But its legacy as a beautiful and special miracle serum — capable of turning one into Kate Bosworth in Blue Crush, starting with the the long dangly bits of dead skin hanging off your scalp and also ending there — lives on. Take, for instance, this excerpt from a recent-ish xoJane post entitled “I’m Still Upset That John Frieda Discontinued Beach Blonde Ocean Waves”:

I have tried every single salt spray on the market, but none compares to the heavenly scent and dreamy waves left behind by the now-discontinued John Frieda product Beach Blonde Ocean Waves…

The color of a Caribbean lagoon, it has a blue oily layer that takes up about a third of the bottle, while the rest more closely resembles a briny sea. When shaken, somehow this spray is just the right amount of greasy and salty to make hair wavy if it’s straight, curly if if is wavy, and straight-up corkscrews if it is curly.

RIP Beach Blonde Ocean Waves, you salty sea goddess. This is a sentiment that many denizens of the Internet agree with: if you probe around for answers, as I have, you’ll find that the tone of former Beach Blonde enthusiasts ranges from dejected (“I think it sux that they don’t make it anymore”) to wildly desperate (“John Frieda Beach Blonde Ocean Waves HELP!!!!!!!!!!!”). At MakeUpAlley, too, many users have added their plaintive wails to the product’s funereal dirge in place of reviews. Some are traumatized:

I was traumatized when this product was discontinued 🙁 Traumatized.
Please John Frieda…. bring it back.
I promise I will buy it again in abundance… and I will tell everyone I know to buy and use it.
Please, please!

Some are melancholic and nostalgic, recalling the good old days:

OMGGGGGG. I really hope SOMEONE at John Frieda sees this page and brings Ocean Waves back WITH THE EXACT SAME FORMULA. Just seeing the pic of it triggered intense *must grab* feelings! I used to use this everyday and it actually made my hair healthier. One time, I actually sprayed my hair down with it at the beach and OMG….best hair ever. It looked like the grl’s did on the bottle with the long hair.
*Thinking about how great everything about this was…*
The bottle, the colour, the scent, the price, the perfectly fine mist of the nozzle…ahh I could go on and on…

Some are simply baffled:

WHY? WHY? WHY? Can I not buy this product anymore??? Im going away in 2 weeks’ time and wanted to buy this, along with the John Freida Beach Blonde Lemon Lights product which was also FANTASTIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am seriously at a loss as to why you would discontinue such fab products!

A full bottle of the illustrious substance now sells for up to $75.00 on eBay [via capitalism]. There’s also a petition calling for the product to be brought back (“If you loved Beach Blonde Cool Dip Shampoo and Smooth Seas Conditioner – this is the petition for you”), and its distressing absence from this world has even been lamented in the pages of the New York Times.

Despite all of the noise, though, John Frieda will not bring the product back. I reached out to the company for comment and was greeted by deafening silence (the silence of the indifferent and endless sea, devoid forever of the dulcet lapping of Beach Blonde Ocean Waves), but some intrepid woman did manage to get through in the 2000s. It seems that all of the Beach Blonde hair product line was canceled due to low sales, which is a pretty boring reason and much worse than my leading conspiracy theory (that the “sea salt” mixture was the tears of effortlessly popular teenaged girls harvested during particularly emotional episodes of The O.C., which — COINCIDENTALLY? — ended its run in 2007).

Quoth John Frieda, “We will have a replacement product for Ocean Waves only called Brilliant Brunette Starlit Waves… Starlit Waves can be used on any hair color.” Um, okay, confusing messaging there. So I guess the moral of this story is that people love well-packaged things, nostalgia, stuff that smells like the ocean, abiding by a “beach blonde”/”brilliant brunette” dichotomy, and expressing their grievances over various Internet platforms.

Are there any discontinued products that have LITERALLY RUINED YOUR LIFE by vanishing from the planet? Please share your frustrations in the comments. John Frieda is not listening, but I am.