Hair relaxers, skin lighteners slammed
PRETORIA: “I should be left alone to be the beautiful person that I want to be.”
Those were the powerful words of actress Florence Masebe during a round-table discussion on the use and dangers of skin-lightening products and hair-relaxers at the Sheraton Hotel here yesterday.
The event was hosted by the Department of Science and Technology.
Masebe spoke of her personal experiences in the entertainment industry as an actress and how her dark skin and natural hair have caused problems and even cost her some jobs.
“When you get into the make-up room, you are made to feel like there’s something wrong with the skin God gave you,” Masebe said. She said the same panicked look make-up artists wore was the one hair stylists got when they had to style her natural hair.
She said the reality was that in the entertainment industry they would cast light-skinned women in a role because a dark-skinned woman didn’t fit the “bombshell look”. Masebe said she recently had to do a photo shoot for one of her television programmes and she was asked to wear a wig because it was a “glamorous shoot” – giving the implication that her natural hair was not glamorous.
Other speakers at the roundtable discussion included doctors and scientists who had done research on the phenomenon of skin-bleaching and hair-relaxers. Professor Ncoza Dlova, head of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s dermatology department, said women have continued to use skin-bleaching products since the beginning of this phenomenon in the 1960s.
“Now women use these creams all over their bodies, unlike before when they used it only on their faces and necks,” Dlova said. One of the effects of the creams is ochronosis (skin damage), which is totally irreversible.
She said some of the reasons people bleached their skin were because of media and advertising influences, low self-esteem, treatment of disorders and pigmentation, ignorance and the fact that it was a multibillion-dollar industry and global phenomenon.
Professor Nonhlanhla Khumalo, from UCT, has done case studies and clinical research on the risks of hair-relaxers. She said the first patent for hair-relaxers was applied for in the early 1900s by Garret Augustus Morgan. It contained sodium hydroxide, yet in 2016, relaxers still contain the same chemical.
“Sodium hydroxide increases the pH levels of your skin. A healthy pH level is 6, or lower than 7, but relaxers (which contain sodium hydroxide) increase your pH levels to 14. A pH level of 14 is considered to be corrosive. Then you put neutraliser (usually in shampoo form) to bring down the pH level and you get your hair to be permanently straight,” Khumalo explained.
She said the risk of getting traction alopecia (hair loss) increases by 30 percent when a woman uses hair relaxers. Khumalo warned that even children’s relaxers, which have been thought to be milder on the scalp, do the same job in terms of raising pH levels to 14.
“There is no skin-friendly relaxer. It does not exist,” Khumalo said.
Another startling revelation was that hair relaxers had similar technology to hair removal creams.
“The technology is outdated. We need to stop using it and we need to find more up-todate technology to help us,” she said. She said more should be done to help those who wanted to keep their hair natural and said funding was needed to do research in this regard.