Inside the court fight over the safety of hair relaxers and Black hair care

Growing up in Chatham in the late 1990s, Traccye Love wished for the long, smooth tresses of pop star Aaliyah.

“That was the look then — smooth and straight,” said Love, 40, of Oak Park. “My mom would press it [with a hot comb], but I wanted it to stay straight.”

Love wasn’t allowed to get her first chemical hair relaxer until she turned 18. For most of the women in her close-knit, predominantly Black community, the rite of passage of using relaxers to straighten their naturally kinky, thick hair had come much younger. Love’s mother worried about the dangers of using a relaxer: chemical burns or brittle hair caused by lye and similar chemicals in hair-straightening products.

Throughout college, and well into her 30s, Love slathered on chemicals from home straightening kits every six weeks or so. Then, in her late 30s, she began to feel knee-buckling abdominal pain during her menstrual cycles — on her worst days each month, Love downed five 200-milligram tablets of ibuprofen every four hours.

“It felt like someone was taking my ovary and twisting it like a balloon,” Love said. After several years and trips to three different doctors, tests revealed Love had multiple, golf ball-sized fibroid tumors in her uterus. In 2022, at age 38, she had a hysterectomy. She was still using hair relaxers until her husband spotted a social media post about lawsuits targeting the manufacturers. She now thinks the relaxers caused her tumors.

“It had never occurred to me that there was serious risk [to using relaxers],” Love said. “I thought the risk was getting scalp burns.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

In October 2022, the first of several thousand lawsuits was filed at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in the Loop by a woman from St. Louis claiming that chemicals in hair relaxer products she used — such as Soft Sheen, Just for Me, and Dark & Lovely — caused her cancer.

Near-identical lawsuits began piling up in state and federal courts across the U.S. The federal cases — now counting about 8,500 plaintiffs, with more added every week — were consolidated last year in front of a single federal judge in Chicago. Dozens of cases have been filed in Cook County, and dozens more are in front of judges in local jurisdictions across the country. Love filed a lawsuit of her own in June.

Through the 1990s, Chicago was the epicenter of the Black-owned Black hair product industry. Homegrown companies including Soft Sheen, Johnson Products and Namaste Laboratories built brands that were Black household names. Sales and mergers have seen multinational corporations take over brands that dominate the market. The wave of litigation has meant Chicago is again playing a central role in the fate of the industry.

Jim Cooper/AP file

The number of plaintiffs is likely to get much bigger: Nine of 10 Black women have used hair relaxer products at some point, many using them regularly for a decade or longer. The litigation could continue for decades, as conditions that have been associated with the products — uterine cancer, fibroids and other illnesses — might not appear for years.

The litigation in 2022 began weeks after a National Institutes of Health study found that women who regularly used hair relaxers developed uterine cancer at more than twice the rate of women who did not. Previous studies on relaxer use and chemicals — which commonly contain chemicals such as formaldehyde, phthalates and parabens — have shown higher rates of breast and ovarian cancer, a higher incidence of fibroids and more aggressive tumor growth.

“I feel like if a product is even possibly linked to a serious condition, it should be outlawed,” Love said. “At least with cigarettes, there’s a warning.”

A spokesman for L’Oreal, asked about the cases, pointed to a statement the company put out in November that said the uterine cancer study didn’t make a “causal connection” to the products and medical conditions identified in the lawsuits.

“While we understand the desire of each plaintiff to find answers to and relief from their personal health concerns, we are confident in the safety of SoftSheen-Carson’s products and believe the allegations made in these lawsuits have neither legal nor scientific merit,” the statement says.

Kimberly Norman, senior director of safety and regulatory toxicology for the Personal Care Products Council, an industry organization, similarly has said an “association does not equal causation.”

“The association observed in the study is with people who straighten their hair, not the ingredients in hair products or any specific chemicals as this data was not collected,” Norman said in 2022.

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Beauty standards and hair relaxers

Love’s story is a common one for Black women. At some point in childhood, girls or their parents turned to relaxers when the labor required to coax their thickly coiled hair into braids or pigtails, or the regimen of hot combs and oils, becomes too much work. Often, the desire to look like the smooth-haired woman peering out from magazines and boxes on home relaxer kits became the attraction.

The roots go back to slavery and colonialism in the United States. When enslaved Africans were brought to America, their traditional hairstyles were effectively banned by racist codes. The definition of “good hair,” as straight and coiffed in European style, was eventually reinforced by the beauty industry and by dress codes that banned styles like locs and braids.

Even where Black hairstyles aren’t banned outright, they aren’t exactly welcomed: In a recent survey, two-thirds of Black women reported changing their hairstyles before job interviews, and 41% of them opted to straighten their hair. In 2021, relaxers accounted for $718 million in sales across the globe.

Recently, lawmakers have taken on the problem of discrimination based on hairstyles. Since 2019, Illinois and 23 other states have adopted some version of the CROWN Act — Creating a Respectful and Open World Natural Hair — legislation that expands discrimination laws to include ethnic hairstyles.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

The jingle for Soft Sheen’s “Just For Me” relaxer — marketed specifically to young girls — is what grabbed April Preyar, a Chicago attorney, as a child.

The sing-song tune was stuck in Preyar’s head after she was contacted by a large personal injury law firm in fall 2022 and asked to help recruit Black women as clients in the relaxer lawsuits.

Preyar had practiced criminal defense and civil rights law, and a massive product liability case seemed out of her wheelhouse. But she got her first hair relaxer, or “perm,” at 11 and went to a salon every six weeks for a touch-up until she was in her mid-20s. She even took a part-time job in college to make money solely spent on getting her hair proverbially “fried and laid.”

Like Traccye Love, Preyar emulated a certain R&B singer: “I wanted it bone straight, like Aaliyah, with it hanging down in my face.”

Two days before Thanksgiving last year, she signed on to be the face of the lawsuit in Chicago.

“I personally think this will be the largest lawsuit of its kind with Black female victims,” she said.

Preyar — who went natural in 1999 — spent more than a year taking speaking engagements and TV interviews on CNN and at the Black Women’s Expo in Chicago last August. Law firms have taken out ads on bus stops and billboards in predominantly Black neighborhoods across the United States.

The science

The science linking at-home hair relaxers — which have likely changed formulas numerous times since the most popular products were developed in the 1960s — to certain illnesses is not airtight. A direct correlation between relaxer use and serious illness hasn’t been documented. That’s not unusual, even in successful lawsuits, according to Noah Smith-Drelich, an IIT-Kent College of Law professor who has studied mass torts like the relaxer case.

“That kind of correlation, where you can say, ‘This chemical or this product caused this specific illness for this person,’ is just not something that science is going to be able to produce,” Smith-Drelich said. “What science does better is probabilistic (to) say more broadly that this group of people have this level of experience and have this increase in developing this injury.”

Phthalates, a possible carcinogen known to interfere with the endocrine system and likely an element of the fragrances used in relaxer products, have been banned in most consumer products in Europe as well as in some states, including California.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations for cosmetics and beauty products don’t require a detailed listing of ingredients on the label, and phthalates are commonly used to make perfumes last longer, often identified only as “fragrance.” But in January, the FDA said it was considering a ban on formaldehyde — commonly used in dyes and relaxers — in hair products.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Moving away from relaxers

Jasmine Valentine, who has a Chicago hair-styling business called Crowned by Jai, got her first perm when she was 5 or 6 and kept getting the white cream applied until she was 18.

“I didn’t like how they made my hair feel,” said Valentine, 32. “I didn’t like the side effects that they have, which is perm burns.”

Today, only two of her 100 clients ask for relaxers, according to Valentine, who said there was a trend well before the court fight away from relaxers because there are hotter curling irons to get hair straighter and more Black hair care products that prevent frizziness.

Valentine says she doesn’t think the lawsuits are having an impact and none of her stylist friends even know about the suits.

“I hope that in this lawsuit, they find out what’s the root of the problem, because it’s just sad,” Valentine said. “I hope that they’re able to be compensated for anything that the relaxer has caused.”

She said Black women historically relaxed their hair because “We were taught to hate ourselves. We were taught to hate our skin. We were taught to hate anything that was ethnic and natural about us. So they put people on TV that were lighter, that had straighter hair or that looked a certain way. And, you know, everybody wants to live up to those standards.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

LaQuana Johnson, a stylist at Elite Hair Therapy in Bronzeville, said only about six of her 40 regular clients come to her for relaxers. Ebony Grisby-Terry, a high school teacher, is one of them. Johnson checks, sections and meticulously applies a base of grease on Grisby-Terry’s scalp before applying the relaxer. The process takes about 30 minutes. When it’s time to apply the relaxer, Johnson is careful not to brush chemicals on the scalp but only on the wavy new growth.

Grisby-Terry, 45, has been getting relaxers since grade school and has no plans to stop.

“I don’t like the natural hair on me. I don’t care for the shrinkage,” Grisby-Terry said. “I like the length that the relaxer gives. And I just don’t like doing my own hair at all. There’s a lot of maintenance involved with the natural hair.”

Johnson is aware of the studies and the lawsuit, but they haven’t deterred her from giving relaxers. Johnson points out the products she uses in the salon require a professional license and typically cost more than three times as much as home kits.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

‘Wouldn’t have used them’

There could be another decade of research available before the first federal cases go to trial, and about as long for those filed in state courts. It’s already been nearly two years since the first federal lawsuit was filed, and lawyers are still negotiating what company records need to be turned over and how.

Meanwhile, women and their families wait.

Sheree Sanders, of Detroit, filed a federal lawsuit in February 2023, saying decades of relaxer use led to her uterine cancer. Her husband, Arther Sanders, learned about the case in January when a letter from a law firm arrived at their house the day before her funeral.

Sheree Sanders started wearing her hair straight well before they became a couple in the mid-1990s, and he spotted a box of Dark & Lovely relaxer in her medicine cabinet soon after they moved in together.

“I used to tell her, ‘You know I love you because you’re dark and you’re lovely,’ ’’ Arther Sanders said.

He still finds hair care products in the bedroom where his wife spent most of her days after she was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2019. She had a hysterectomy, followed by more surgeries to remove tumors and chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She died in January at 58.

Her husband said the surgeries left her unable to continue working as a home health care aide, and complications from the operations sapped her vivacious personality.

“I would always hear her crying, and she would say, ‘My life will never be the same,’” Sanders said. “She didn’t associate any of those [hair products] with cancer. If she had known that or thought that, she wouldn’t have used them.”

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times