The Disturbing Truth About Hair Relaxers
A recent New York Times Magazine article featured Tamarra James-Todd, Associate Professor of Environmental Reproductive Epidemiology, and her research concerning endocrine disrupting chemicals in hair relaxers, as well as other commonly used hair products, and Black women’s health. The article shows how environmental health science can be used for action to improve consumer product chemical safety.
Photo: Naila Ruechel for The New York Times
James-Todd began her research as a graduate student at Columbia University looking between hair products during childhood that contain endocrine disrupting chemicals, such as relaxers, and early onset puberty in Black women. Since then, she has conducted or been a co-author of nearly 70 scientific investigations over the past 20 years to establish the connection between the chemicals in hair products that generations of Black women have used to straighten their hair and the reproductive-health racial disparities that scientists have struggled to explain for decade.
And the research by James-Todd and others is beginning to prompt changes, “Over the past year and a half, this research has prompted lawsuits involving nearly 9,000 plaintiffs across the country and at least the promise of new action from the federal government.”
James-Todd expresses that “the process in the [regulatory] system that we use is problematic, because it doesn’t protect consumers in the way that consumers think it does,” regarding the FDA’s current safety regulations for hair relaxers and other beauty products.
Read the full New York Times Magazine article here, “The Disturbing Truth About Hair Relaxers.”
Learn more Dr. Tamarra James-Todd’s work with about the Environmental Reproductive Justice Lab.
Learn more about the next Environmental Justice Boot Camp.
