Risky beauty standards

If you’ve been reading my newsletter from the beginning, you know I like to take trips down ’90s memory lane. And for two weeks I’ve been thinking about Black women and girls and the lengths so many of us would go to back then to straighten our hair.

I think I was about 10 when I decided I wanted a perm. I don’t know why or where I got the idea that straight hair would be better than my natural hair. All I knew was that I wanted to have long hair like the models on the front of the perm packaging. My mom asked me if I was sure, but for her, managing my thick natural hair every day for school was a lot. Did I understand that a relaxer meant I would have to go to the salon every six weeks to relax the new growth? I was sure.

So my mom bought an at-home chemical relaxer kit, and she got to work over the kitchen sink. The chemical perm was a white, lotion-y goop with a harsh smell. Some of the relaxer got into my eye and started to sting, leaving a blister on my inner eyelid. But my hair was straight! Not long, but straight(ish) and flowy. I felt grown.

For the next decade, we would go to our hairdresser, Ms. Lena, every week to get the perm. She would apply the cream and leave it on my natural growth — sometimes for too long. My scalp would itch and burn, which would leave scabs. Even then, I wondered whether the chemicals were safe.

But the salon became the ritual. Anything for hair that looked longer, silkier, more “manageable.”

Now, over the past two weeks, chemical hair relaxers have come back into the spotlight, and not for any good reason. A large new study from the National Institutes of Health found a link between their use and increased rates of uterine cancer. Given that Black women and girls are more likely to use relaxers, and to start them at an early age, we are more at risk, the study authors reported. Jenny Mitchell, a Black woman in Missouri, filed a federal lawsuit this month against the makers of some of the relaxers, alleging that they knew, or should have known, that the products presented a cancer risk but sold them anyway. Mitchell believes the chemical relaxers contributed to her uterine cancer, which led to her hysterectomy. (In a statement, the Personal Care Products Council, a cosmetics industry group, said the NIH study did not prove that hair relaxers caused uterine cancer.)

The NIH study suggests that white beauty standards are literally life-threatening for us. Black women and girls have long been told that our natural hair is “nappy,” “unprofessional” or otherwise not acceptable at school or in the workforce. We were told by well-meaning friends and relatives to straighten it to be more acceptable in society.

In the mid-2010s, many Black women ditched the relaxers and started wearing their natural hair, me included. In some states, we now, in theory, have legal protections against hair discrimination, in the form of Crown Acts barring race-based hair discrimination in education and employment. But Black women, in the spotlight and out, still face pressure to not wear their fully natural hair, and some have been going back to relaxers.

Personally, I think Black women should do whatever they want with their hair. But we deserve to be informed about any chemicals in products that we are putting on our bodies. We should demand that companies use safer ingredients.

Oh, and as for those perm-box girls I wanted to look like?

Many of them also decided to go for the natural-hair look.