I’ve been getting my hair braided ever since I was a little girl. In elementary school my Moesha obsession meant Brandy-style box braids; in middle school, Alicia Keys was the reason behind my cornrows, and even now, a vacation is not a vacation without a head full of boho braids.
I always thought of braids as a healthy alternative to what I could be doing with my hair: no more chemical straighteners with their awful smell, inevitable scalp burns, and adverse health effects.
Earlier this year, however, the Silent Spring Institute — which researches the environmental causes for breast cancer — released a study that made me question how healthy that choice actually is.
Elissia Franklin is a chemist and exposure scientist at the Institute who decided to test what chemicals are in braiding hair after noticing a phrase pop in her colleagues’ work that was familiar to her.
“They were helping study participants swap out their couches because they wanted to reduce flame-retardant chemicals in the indoor dust in the homes,” she told me. “Anytime I bought my braiding hair, it said flame-resistant. It just dawned on me: If they’re trying to get rid of flame retardants from couches, why can we so intimately use these products in our everyday lives?”
Franklin evaluated 43 hair extension products and found “chemicals that were associated with cancer, birth defects and reproductive harm. Chemicals like flame retardants, organotin compounds, and phthalates.”
These chemicals don’t just pop up in hair extensions — they’re in many other cosmetics too. “Sometimes people just see this as a women’s health issue,” Ami Zota, a professor of environmental health studies at Columbia University, told me. “Everyone uses some kind of cosmetics, whether it’s soap or lotion or toothpaste.”
So how can consumers navigate these everyday products? Zota tells us on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, including more with Franklin and other experts, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
How does cosmetic regulation work in the US?
It’s largely industry-driven and mostly voluntary forms of regulation. The FDA provides minimal oversight, and they also have minimal funding to actually make sure that the industries are following the regulations that are there.
Most of the regulations testing the companies do is to make sure there aren’t adverse immediate reactions like eczema or skin rashes. The system of regulation is less effective at gauging long-term risk, like those that may lead to cancer or difficulty in getting pregnant. It’s mostly testing one product at a time and looking at short-term effects.
You write about the “environmental injustice of beauty.” Can you explain what that means?
The idea is to shine a light on the social and historical factors that drive what we find beautiful because beauty is a very old form of power. It’s a gendered form of power. It’s one of the forms of power that were most available to women historically, and it’s impacted by things like colonialism, racism, sexism.
There is a hierarchy of beauty like a pyramid, and it’s really driven by Eurocentric notions of beauty that favor lighter skin, straighter hair, thinner bodies. Simply put: The closer you are to the top of that pyramid, the greater benefits you’ll see, whether it’s a higher likelihood of finding a suitable husband in South Asian countries like my native country of India, or in this country, the greater likelihood of getting a certain job if you’re a Black woman and you wear your hair straight.
When you look at the back of a bottle of shampoo and you see that list of ingredients, it can feel like you need a PhD in biochemistry to read it. How do I understand what’s going on there, and what I should be avoiding?
There are apps that can help you do that. You could use an app Clearya and where you could take a picture of your ingredient labels and it’ll flag the problematic ones for you. Skin Deep is another one that will give you a score that tells you how hazardous your products are. Then there’s the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and they have a nice list of some of the most common ones there too.
Give me an example of one cosmetic and walk me through what I should look out for.
Take lotion. Lotion doesn’t get enough attention, but it has a lot of preservatives and often it’s the preservatives that give it a longer shelf life. That often can be some of the stuff we want to stay away from. And there are a lot of different lotions; you can have a lotion that has four products, or you could have a lotion that has 50 products including formaldehyde releasers. There’s formaldehyde itself, but then there’s these chemicals that can degrade or release into formaldehyde. We have found that lotion, because it sits on your skin for a long time, you’re not rinsing it off, is actually an important one.
When we talk about beauty justice, it’s also the right of people to be able to present themselves and use the products they want to use without having to risk their health. The goal is not to police everyone’s behavior or the products they use, but to help give them tools.
Companies respond to consumer pressure and consumer demand. You have a lot of power with your dollar. Asking companies to make safer hair products, especially that will serve the needs of Black women and other women of color, is in and of itself really powerful because federal policy just takes a really long time. Have everyday conversations about how we choose to show up in the world, [because] so much of that gets shaped when we’re young.
