118 North Delaware Street Indianapolis, Indiana 46204
Public Statements From Adverse Effects of Hair Relaxers
K. Smith
The kitchen used to be my stepmother’s makeshift salon; it was where I got my first hair relaxer. I was 13 and knew nothing about the process of this hair treatment, all I knew was my hair was finally going to be bone straight like some of my white classmates and would soon swing across my shoulders freely.
So, there I sat as my uncertified stepmother applied a cream that stunk of chemicals, I couldn’t pronounce nor spell. Vaseline was placed haphazardly around the border of my head in an effort to ensure the relaxer didn’t burn me — the irony of this is almost laughable now. As the cream was being applied, I wondered how this little cylindrical tub was going to take my ‘naps’ away. Imagine, I was 13 and I knew what ‘nappy’ meant and fully understood the negative connotations of the word for kinky afro hair like mine; I had it hurled at me in the past by classmates and I wanted no parts of it. At first, I didn’t feel anything but eventually, a small tingling sensation started around my head that then escalated to a feeling akin to my head being on fire. I was told to sit with the cream in my hair until it was ready to be washed out, the stinging continued, but I didn’t say anything — I thought the longer I held out the straighter my hair would be.
I couldn’t have been more wrong, the process of relaxing my hair went on for as long as my hair could take it. Eventually, as if to say I’ve done too much to it, my hair broke off, my scalp succumbed to the stinging and produced scabby patches that itched like no tomorrow
April P.
Many got their first relaxers at 5 or 6 years old to make their hair more manageable for their caregivers. Most continued to relax their hair for decades for job security and upward economic mobility. By my estimation, this will be the largest lawsuit of its kind involving Black women victims in U.S. history. It will dwarf Camp LeJeune, the talcum powder, and Essure cases with its number of plaintiffs. It will have global implications on women in the U.K, France, the Caribbean, Canada, and African countries. As I listen to the endless horror stories of African-American cis women across the country, I can’t help but to wonder if the three traumatic, painful surgeries I had for growths on my ovaries are due to my use of hair relaxers for nearly a decade and a half.
Although my bilateral cysts were benign, I remember sobbing uncontrollably at work, weeks before my first surgery. I remember being paralyzed with fear after each surgery as I waited for oncology results to confirm that I was in fact, not ill. I relive that fear every single time I visit the gynecologist. Though I was one of the fortunate, the heartbreak that the women I have spoken to is eerily familiar.
T. Love
“That was the look then — smooth and straight,” said Love, 40, of Oak Park. “My mom would press it [with a hot comb], but I wanted it to stay straight.”
Love wasn’t allowed to get her first chemical hair relaxer until she turned 18. For most of the women in her close-knit, predominantly Black community, the rite of passage of using relaxers to straighten their naturally kinky, thick hair had come much younger. Love’s mother worried about the dangers of using a relaxer: chemical burns or brittle hair caused by lye and similar chemicals in hair-straightening products.
Throughout college, and well into her 30s, Love slathered on chemicals from home straightening kits every six weeks or so. Then, in her late 30s, she began to feel knee-buckling abdominal pain during her menstrual cycles — on her worst days each month, Love downed five 200-milligram tablets of ibuprofen every four hours.
“It felt like someone was taking my ovary and twisting it like a balloon,” Love said. After several years and trips to three different doctors, tests revealed Love had multiple, golf ball-sized fibroid tumors in her uterus. In 2022, at 38, she had a hysterectomy. She was still using hair relaxers until her husband spotted a social media post about lawsuits targeting the manufacturers. She now thinks the relaxers caused her tumors.
“It had never occurred to me that there was serious risk [to using relaxers],” Love said. “I thought the risk was getting scalp burns.”