Federal regulators have recalled about 254,000 Sloosh dive sticks after determining the pool toys violate a long-standing federal ban and can seriously injure children. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that the hard-plastic sticks exceed the compression limit set by the dive-sticks ban, creating an impalement hazard if a child falls or lands on one in shallow water. The recall was issued by Joyin, the company that sold the toys.
Why a decades-old ban still matters
The federal dive-sticks ban exists because rigid underwater retrieval toys have a specific and dangerous failure mode. When a child dives into shallow water to grab a stick that has sunk to the bottom, the stick can stand upright or be driven into the body, and its stiffness is what turns a routine pool game into a piercing injury. The regulation limits how much force a compliant stick can withstand before it gives way, so that it collapses rather than impaling.
According to the CPSC, the recalled Sloosh sticks exceeded that compression limit, which is the technical reason they fall under the ban. The agency also warned that facial and eye injuries are possible when children attempt to retrieve the sticks underwater, not just impalement. That combination is why regulators treat rigid dive sticks as inherently unsafe rather than merely defective examples of an otherwise acceptable product.
The recall is a reminder that some product categories are prohibited outright, and that items sold through major online marketplaces still slip past those rules and reach households before enforcement catches up.
The specifics of the recall
The recall covers dive sticks contained in packages of Sloosh water toys carrying model number 40041, which is printed on the back of the box next to the bar code and on one end of each stick. The CPSC describes the recalled sticks as made of hard plastic, cylinder-shaped, roughly 7 inches long and about 1 inch or less in diameter. Only the sticks with model 40041 sold before October 23, 2025, are included.
The toys were sold online at Amazon.com, Temu.com, Wayfair.com, Plus.Target.com, and SHEIN.com from February 2019 through October 2025 for between $17 and $22, according to the agency’s notice. That spread of retailers and the multi-year sales window explain how a single model reached a quarter-million units before the recall.
The CPSC’s published notice is the authoritative record here, and it lays out both the hazard and the remedy. The agency’s broader recalls database catalogs similar actions against non-compliant toys and pool products, which continue to appear despite the ban.
What owners should do now
Consumers who have the recalled sticks should stop using them immediately, take them away from children, and dispose of them, the CPSC says. The remedy Joyin is offering requires a specific step: owners are asked to take a photo of the discarded dive sticks in the trash and email it to the company at [email protected]. Once that photo is received, Joyin will send redesigned dive sticks that meet federal regulations as a free replacement.
The notice reviewed for this article does not state whether any injuries have been reported in connection with the recalled sticks, so readers should not assume the count is zero or otherwise. What the agency has confirmed is the hazard the ban is designed to prevent, not a tally of harm already done, and that distinction matters when weighing how urgently to act. In practice, the safest course does not depend on an injury count: a rigid stick that exceeds the compression limit is exactly the type of product the ban targets, regardless of whether a specific child has yet been hurt.
For parents, the practical lesson extends beyond this one model. Retrieval toys sold cheaply through online marketplaces can carry hazards that a shopper would have no easy way to spot, because the danger is a matter of the plastic’s stiffness rather than anything visible on the packaging. Checking the CPSC’s recall listings before buying pool toys, and again if a product has been sitting in a garage for several summers, is a low-effort way to avoid exactly the kind of banned item at issue here.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
