Aldi recall: shoppers warned of hairdryer electric shock or fire risk. How to check yours

What has been recalled, exactly

The notice on GOV.UK is Product Recall 2610-0111, published by the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) on 19 October 2026 with a recall date of 16 October. It covers one product: the Ambiano Ionic Hairdryer, model 849855, sold by Aldi in four colours, black, white, yellow and orange. The notice gives the sales period as August and September 2025. Aldi's own recall page narrows it to hairdryers bought between 21 August and 30 September 2025. The country of origin is given as China, and the notice was raised by local authority trading standards.

Each colour has its own barcode, and the barcode is printed on the underside of the dryer itself, not only on the box: 4061462195075 for black, 4061462195211 for white, 4061462195310 for yellow and 4061462195372 for orange. Aldi's page, written for people who have thrown the packaging away, says that if the middle code on the underside is one of those four, the dryer is covered. Aldi chains abroad have announced their own recalls of Ambiano ionic hairdryers with other barcodes, such as Hofer's in Austria, for purple, pink and grey dryers; for a dryer bought from Aldi in the UK, the UK notice and the four barcodes above are the ones that apply.

The dates are worth noticing. Aldi's page gives a product recall date of 8 October 2026. OPSS's recall date is 16 October, and the GOV.UK page went up on 19 October. So Aldi's own page dates the recall eleven days before the GOV.UK notice went up, which is one reason to check a retailer's recall page as well as the list. How to do that is further down.

The hazard, in the notice's words

OPSS puts it like this: "The product presents a risk of electric shock or fire as, over time, the power cord may become damaged, allowing access to live parts or causing overheating. If the user were to touch an accessible live part, they could receive an electric shock." The product does not meet the requirements of the Electrical Equipment (Safety) Regulations 2016, the UK law that sets the safety requirements electrical goods must satisfy before they are sold. The notice's PDF gives the risk type as electric shock and fire, and the risk level as high, the second of OPSS's levels after serious.

Aldi describes the same recall more gently. Its page says that "as a precautionary measure" its supplier is recalling the hairdryer "because of a technical fault", and answers "How serious is it?" with "This is a precautionary recall." The two accounts do not differ on what you should do: both say stop using the hairdryer and take it back. Two details follow from the notice's wording. The fault is one that develops over time, so a cord that looks fine today is not a reason to carry on. And neither notice reports an injury; neither says there has not been one either.

What to do, and how the refund works

Stop using it. Take it to your nearest Aldi store for a full refund. The notice says nearest store, not the store you bought it from. Neither OPSS nor Aldi says anything about a receipt. Aldi's page treats the barcode on the underside as the thing that identifies the dryer, which is what its question about thrown-away packaging is for. If you want to be sure before a trip, Aldi's page ends with a link to its customer-service webform, and a photo of the underside, taken before you go, settles which colour and code you have.

The remedy on offer is a refund, not a repair. The notice does not offer one, and a cord fault that develops over time is not something a look at the cord rules out. The straightforward course is the one both notices give: unplug it, put it somewhere it will not be picked up by habit, and take it back.

What this notice does not cover

One model, four colours, one sales window. The notice does not name any other Aldi product and does not name any other hairdryer. In the OPSS list on GOV.UK, which runs from January 2021 and held 3,783 notices on 21 October, this is the only notice that names the Ambiano brand, and the only hairdryer notice that names Aldi: a search of the list for "Ambiano" that day returned this notice alone. A search for "Aldi" returned six others, all older and all for other products: five recalls from 2022 and 2023 with "sold by Aldi" in their titles, and a toy recall first published in February 2026 that names Aldi among the retailers involved. An Ambiano hairdryer with a different barcode, or a hairdryer of another brand, is not covered by this notice. That is not a statement that it is safe; it is a statement that this notice does not name it.

Hairdryers have appeared in the list every year since it began. By our count, 36 notices since January 2021 have "hairdryer" or "hair dryer" in the title: 20 are product safety reports, mostly about imports stopped at the border, and 16 are recalls, this one included, mostly by retailers or of listings on online marketplaces. Each of those is a separate notice with its own model numbers, barcodes and instructions, which is why we do not run them together here. GOV.UK's list can be searched by product name to see them, each on its own page.

How to check any appliance against a recall

The place to start is GOV.UK's Product Safety Alerts, Reports and Recalls list, which OPSS maintains. It publishes products notified to the Product Safety Database that present a serious or high risk, and products that have been recalled or put under a modification programme. You can search it by brand or product name and filter by alert type, risk level, product category, measure and date, and you can sign up for emails when new notices are added. OPSS's guidance explains the three kinds of entry. A product recall is for a specific product sold in the UK that may require you to act to get a free replacement, repair or refund. A product safety report is for a product where the corrective measure is something other than a recall: many are imports stopped at the border before they could be sold, or listings removed from an online marketplace. A product safety alert covers a whole category or sector with a risk of serious injury. The list does not cover food and drink, vehicles, or medicines and medical devices, which have their own alert systems at the Food Standards Agency (Food Standards Scotland in Scotland), the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

The list can lag a retailer's own notice: Aldi dates this recall 8 October, and it reached GOV.UK on 19 October. Manufacturers and retailers also announce recalls themselves, and Aldi keeps a Product Recall section on its customer help site. So the full check for an appliance is three places: the GOV.UK list, the manufacturer's website using the model number on the rating label, and the retailer's own recall page. For electrical products, the charity Electrical Safety First also runs a free product recall checker.

Registering appliances, so the recall finds you

A recall only works if it reaches you, and the GOV.UK notice for this one went up eleven days after Aldi's own recall date. Register My Appliance is a service run by AMDEA, the UK home-appliance trade association, whose members include more than 150 brands. It lets you register new and older appliances so that the manufacturer can contact you if a safety repair or recall is ever issued, and it keeps a page of current safety repairs and recalls that links to each manufacturer's own instructions; at the time of writing that page is led by the 2025 modification programme for heat pump tumble dryers from several brands.

Registration reaches only the brands that take part. For a brand that does not, a second-hand appliance or something bought from a marketplace seller, the GOV.UK list and the retailer's recall page are the check. A cheap habit covers both: when you buy an appliance, photograph the rating label, so the model number and barcode are in your phone when a headline like this week's appears.