What Black women should know about hair relaxers and cancer

Table Of Content

• Concerns about hair products and cancer
• Hair Straighteners and Relaxers May Be Harmful to Health. Here’s How to Make Them Better
• People who use hair straightening chemicals have an increased risk of cancer
• What Black women should know about hair relaxers and their health
• Results might have greater impact for Black women
• Do hairdressers and barbers have an increased risk of cancer?

By the end of the demo clip she is smiling into the camera, glossy-lipped, with an air of satisfaction and shiny, straight, blown-out tresses falling past her shoulders. There was never anything on the products' packaging, they said and their lawsuits allege, indicating that normal use of the products could cause them to develop uterine fibroids or breast or uterine cancer. The health risks are greatest among Black women due to higher use of these products, evidence consistently shows.

Concerns about hair products and cancer

Uterine cancer is the most common gynecologic cancer in the US, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with rates rising, particularly among Black women. She says in professional settings, including at their jobs, Black women are subject to both hypervisibility – being scrutinized about everything from the work they do to how they look when doing it – and invisibility in being rewarded for good work. This duality produces “a psychosis in Black women in the workplace” trying to fit into corporate structures with the “right” look. As much as Smith’s decision is personal, what Black women choose to do with their hair has always lived in tension with self- and cultural expression, and the quest for inclusion in American society.

Hair Straighteners and Relaxers May Be Harmful to Health. Here’s How to Make Them Better

What are some safer alternatives for people who want to continue to straighten their hair without exposing themselves to harmful chemicals? You can even use a combination of blow-drying your hair out and then flat-ironing it. But these methods can adversely affect the texture of the hair long term, so you’d want to use them sparingly. While uterine cancer is relatively rare, with 60,000 cases diagnosed annually, that number is rising each year, says Ursula Matulonis, MD, the chief of the gynecologic oncology division at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. "One thought has been that our population is more obese and that the body mass index of women has increased in the United States," she says.

People who use hair straightening chemicals have an increased risk of cancer

If it seems like your hair isn't growing, it's possible that it's breaking at the same rate (or faster than) it grows. "You’ll start to notice uneven lengths or areas where the ends look thinner than the base and mid strand," he explains. "A great way to prevent this would definitely be using Mizani’s Press Agent as a regimen between relaxers and also making sure that you protect your hair while sleeping with a satin scarf or pillowcase."

What Black women should know about hair relaxers and their health

These include aromatic amines, which were used as dye intermediates in early permanent hair dye formulations. The researchers did not find links between uterine cancer and the use of other hair products, including hair dyes, highlights, and perms. Some studies have found that individuals who apply permanent hair dye themselves at home have a higher breast cancer risk than those who have it applied by a professional (17, 18). Thousands of Black women have also claimed that hair relaxers from L’Oreal were harmful to their health, including a group of Black women who sued L’Oreal and other companies last year. One woman, Bernadette Gordon, who used hair relaxers from 1983 to 2015, experienced uterine and breast cancer resulting in a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy, she previously told NBC News.

What Black Women Need to Know About Breast Cancer

"Most of them were endometrioid [tumors], which is interesting because that is the more common subtype of endometrial cancer — and is driven by hormonal factors," Dr. Matulonis says. Permanent hair dyes, which make up about 80% of currently marketed hair dye products, use colorless dye intermediates and dye couplers. In the presence of hydrogen peroxide, the intermediates and couplers react with one another to form pigment molecules. Other factors put Black women at risk for developing uterine cancer, including age, obesity and family and reproductive history, Bertrand added. In Abrams’ study — which included women of different races ages 21 to 45 — Black women accounted for the greatest population of people who had started using relaxers at age 10 or younger. More than 50% of the Black participants in the study also had used hair relaxers before they reached age 10.

We can’t say that it’s only the fault of these parabens, phthalates, formaldehyde, and other chemicals. But we can say that in general, if there is an increase in mortality, maybe part of this is a manifestation of years and years of exposure to these hair straighteners. What kinds of chemicals are in these products, and why might they be cause for concern? These products are full of chemicals, and some may be combined with formaldehyde; formaldehyde has been considered carcinogenic and is the same chemical used to preserve dead bodies.

The lawsuits follow the October publication of a National Institutes of Health study that found women who used the products multiple times a year were more than twice as likely to develop uterine cancer. Nearly 60 lawsuits claiming hair relaxer products sold by L’Oréal and other companies cause cancer and other health problems will be consolidated in a Chicago federal court, according to a Monday order from the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation. Bhonopha, whose lawsuit was filed Oct. 21, believes her fibroids were directly caused by her regular and prolonged exposure to phthalates and other endocrine disrupting chemicals found in the hair care products she used. Many salons have alternative hair smoothing products that don’t release formaldehyde when heated.

Do people who use hair straighteners or relaxers have increased risks of cancer?

Some of these chemicals were found in hair relaxers marketed specifically toward children, according to the institute’s research. But the FDA currently does not regulate the use of these chemicals in cosmetics and did not respond to a request for comment. The problem is that now more than ever, the risks of wearing relaxers has been clearly laid out. In groundbreaking research released in October, a National Institutes of Health study of about 34,000 women ages conducted over almost 11 years found the women who reported using chemical straighteners had double the risk of uterine cancer faced by women who didn’t use these products.

Hair Relaxer Cancer Lawsuit - Lawsuit Information Center Blog

Hair Relaxer Cancer Lawsuit.

Posted: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:26:21 GMT [source]

In 2010, a report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that some of the chemicals professional hairdressers are exposed to are “probably carcinogenic to humans” (6). This conclusion is based on many studies that have found an increased risk of bladder cancer in hairdressers and barbers who were occupationally exposed to hair dye (1, 7). A 2010 meta-analysis of 42 studies found that the longer someone had worked as a hairdresser, the more likely they were to have developed bladder cancer. Those who had been hairdressers for at least 10 years were nearly twice as likely to develop bladder cancer as those who had never worked as a hairdresser (7). In the mid- to late 1970s, manufacturers changed the components in permanent hair dye products to eliminate some of the carcinogenic chemicals used as dye intermediates (1, 3, 4). It is not known whether any of the chemicals still used in hair dyes are carcinogenic (5).

“It actually breaks the chemicals of your natural texture and straightens it,” she says. Women who use chemical hair straighteners and relaxers may have a higher risk of uterine cancer, according to a new study from researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). According to this month’s BWHS, women who reported using hair relaxers more than twice a year or who used them for more than five years had a greater than 50% risk of developing uterine cancer compared to those who rarely or never used relaxers, additional data from the study shows.

In the current study, about 60% of the women who reported using straighteners in the previous year self-identified as being Black. While the study didn’t find that the link between straightener use and uterine cancer risk was different by race, the effects may be greater for Black women because they’re more likely to use these products. Relaxers and hair straighteners are cream- or lotion-based formulas that contain chemicals that are applied to the hair for a certain amount of time to change curlier textures to straight or wavy textures.

Recent studies have linked hair dye and hair straightening chemicals to breast cancer, showing a 60% increase in risk for some women who use them. People who use hair dyes frequently as part of their job, such as professional hairdressers, likely have higher exposures to potentially harmful chemicals in these products than people who have their hair dyed in a salon or who dye it at home (that is, “personal users” of hair dye). Thus, studies have been conducted to understand both exposure to hair dyes in the occupational setting and exposure from personal use. The recent study by the National Institutes of Health links a commonly used hair product and cancer. Researchers found women who use chemical hair relaxers more than 4 times a year are 2 times more likely to get uterine cancer than those who don’t. “We estimated that 1.64% of women who never used hair straighteners would go on to develop uterine cancer by the age of 70, but for frequent users, that risk goes up to 4.05%,” study leader Alexandra White of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Safety said in a statement.

Larry Taylor Jr., an attorney at The Cochran Firm in Dallas, said thousands of women from their 20s to their 50s have filed suits alleging they developed ovarian, cervical and endometrial cancers from using hair relaxers. Bertrand’s study found that postmenopausal Black women had a greater risk of developing uterine cancer if they used hair relaxers more than twice a year or consistently for more than five years. Weighing the risks of using these products has largely been left to consumers because relaxers and hair straighteners are considered cosmetic products, the US Food and Drug Administration said in an emailed statement.

Plus, its survival rate is only getting worse, possibly from a rise in more aggressive types of uterine cancer. While the study data are statistically significant, they present what's ultimately "a small attributable — or extra — risk," says Susan Modesitt, MD, the director of the gynecologic oncology division at Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute and editor-in-chief of Gynecologic Oncology Reports. "People just hear 80-percent increased risk and panic, but it's 80 percent of a really tiny risk." In other words, your entire risk isn't 80 percent; it's 80 percent of that 1.64 percent among those who've never used relaxers — an increase of 1.18 percent, which, she says, is still pretty small. “In our study, women who reported using non-lye relaxers were pretty much just as likely to report scalp burns as those who use lye relaxer,” she said.