The dangers of toxic hair straightening, or hair relaxing products made for African American women, was recently investigated in a New York Times magazine article. Some of these products have been linked to reproductive disorders, cancers and other health issues. Whether or not to use these products is just one of the decisions Black women make can come with negative health consequences, as they try to fit in the mold of European beauty standards.
Micaela Martinez, Ph.D., is director of environmental health with the group WE ACT for Environmental Justice. Her organization collaborates with city and state health departments to test a wide range of products for toxicity and shares their data about health impacts.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Martinez, who says such products have disproportionate impacts on people of color, but that the issue affects everyone who uses any personal care products. She warns that the industry standard is to use toxic chemicals and fossil fuel-derived substances.
MICAELA MARTINEZ: When it comes to toxic chemicals in beauty products. What we see is that some of the most notoriously toxic products are those that are created for and marketed to women of color. So, the hair straighteners are one really good example that have been getting a lot of attention recently because of the formaldehyde and hair straighteners being linked to hormone-sensitive cancers such as uterine cancer.
One of the other notoriously toxic beauty products that we work on are skin lighteners. And so skin lighteners are multi-billion dollar industry worldwide and they’re only becoming more popular instead of less popular. And skin lighteners are used for many things including like lightening your skin very generally, but also they will be marketed as making you look younger or brighter, more dewy. They’re also skin lightening products that are used for more targeted areas such as like freckles or dark spots, underarms, elbows, knees, etc.
But the really dangerous thing about skin lighteners is many of them contain mercury. And that’s because mercury, even though it is completely illegal in much of the world to put mercury in cosmetics because mercury is a very dangerous neurotoxin, companies continue to do this illegally and off-label because mercury is an incredibly effective skin lightener because it blocks melanin production in the skin.
So products with mercury are highly effective and we see mercury poisoning cases in the United States along with lots of other health issues associated with skin lighteners because they oftentimes also contain like corticosteroids and another chemical called hydroquinone. And so together these things, mercury, hydroquinone, corticosteroids can effectively lighten the skin but at a very, very high physical cost in terms of these adverse reactions and in some cases like literally brain damage and such.
Then of course there’s the kind of societal impacts and then your impacts on wellbeing and mental health that come with just the existence of skin lighteners. But generally they’re based in white supremacy, colonialism, colorism and classism and some combination of these things. And also in some places patriarchy as well because there’ll be like for instance in India, a lot of the marketing also has to do with kind of bridal marketing as well. Like whether a woman would be able to find a husband, depends on your skin color, etc. etc.
So there are some of the most of toxic, like psychologically toxic notions in society are really wrapped into the existence of marketing, of skin lighteners. It also depends whether you’re looking at the consumer or also occupational health because when we look at hair salons and also nail salons and the use of things like hair relaxers, then women — oftentimes it’s women — and women of color that are working in hair salons that are utilizing hair relaxers and hair dyes and other products regularly that tend to be of high toxicity. So there’s all of that occupational exposure.
And then another kind of salon area where there’s really high occupational exposure is nail salons because you’ll have formaldehyde and a whole slew of endocrine disruptors and toxic chemicals that are routinely used in nail polishes. These acrylics, you name it.
MELINDA TUHUS: It seems like the other aspect besides trying to actually make these things safer, like remove toxic elements, is like a cultural piece that you know, so that women of color don’t feel like this is the beauty norm that they want to achieve. Does the beauty inside out? Is that any part of your work?
MICAELA MARTINEZ: Yeah, that’s a huge part of our work. So that’s what we spend a lot of time doing in our educational discussions. Like we talk about colorism, we talk about these products being based in white supremacy. We also have like hard conversations about the ways that within our own communities we might reinforce some of these negative, these harmful concepts, I would say. So like for instance, when I do trainings about the hazards of skin lightener and I talk about colorism, we need to distinguish that separately from racism. So colorism is within a racial or ethnic group when you have discrimination based on skin color, you know, that’s favoring lighter skin color and being discriminatory against people with darker skin. And so when we have conversations like, okay, when you’re talking to family members, avoiding things that have this undertone to them like, Don’t stay outside too long or, you know, you might get too dark or make sure to to cover up.
For the best listening experience and to never miss an episode, subscribe to Between The Lines on your favorite podcast app or platform.
Or subscribe to our Between The Lines and Counterpoint Weekly Summary.
