Getting Toxic Chemicals Out of Black Women’s Hair Salons
The Atlantic
Vicky Gan
Nov. 13, 2015
Hair relaxers and other popular products can put employees’ health at risk.
… “That’s partly because there’s precious little research on the long-term health effects of salon products. Alexandra Scranton, the director of science and research at the environmental organization Women’s Voices for the Earth, explains: ‘The weakness in the data is being able to connect [health impacts] to specific chemicals, because those connections are almost never studied.’ And so far, research has failed to account for the combination of toxic chemicals found in hair salons. ‘They’ll look at a chemical at a time, but of course a salon worker is never exposed to just one chemical at a time,’ Scranton says.” …
