Detangling the Roots of Black Hair and Health.

“It’s always been the church and the hair salon,” says student Kirsten Minor. Both, she says, have long been central safe spaces for black communities in America.

But even the hair salon can be a site of health disparity, Minor says, with chemical exposure related to hair dye, perms, texturizers, and relaxers contributing to higher rates of a range of health issues among black women.

To address the issue, Minor completed a practicum project, “Detangling the Roots of Black Hair and Health,” with the Boston Public Health Commission’s Safe Shops Project. The initiative seeks to develop relationships with small businesses in occupations where employees and clients are exposed to toxic chemicals, assessing health burdens and offering education to decrease exposure.

After working successfully with nail salons and auto body shops, the Safe Shops Project is taking its first steps into hair salons, particularly those predominantly serving women of color.

To provide a foundation for that work, Minor conducted a literature review of risk factors and adverse health outcomes among hairdressers and clients. Then she went out into the field with questionnaires and surveys to gather primary source data from salons throughout Greater Boston.

“We wanted to get an understanding of what knowledge hairdressers in Boston have about chemical exposure,” Minor says, along with which services they provide most, and whether they would be interested in educational resources and safer products. This will in turn inform the interventions the Safe Shop Project will develop for hair salons.

Minor says the literature—much of it from the Boston University Black Women’s Health Study—shows the risk is greatest for hairdressers. “Hairdressers disproportionately are at increased risk of having adverse sexual reproductive outcomes,” she says. “Miscarriage and uterine fibroids are positively correlated with the use of perms.  Uterine fibroids can impact whether you’re able to conceive, as well as having spontaneous abortion, miscarriage, and low birth weight—and black women unfortunately are already at an increased risk of low birth weight and infant mortality.”

As for clients, Minor says, the Black Women’s Health Study concluded perms are not directly correlated with breast cancer. However, she says there may be a more complex connection.

“Perms and a lot of hair products that black women use in general across the board have elevated levels of hormones,” she says. “So young girls who are getting perms as early as the age are two and three, when they receive that perm, that texturizing, it actually raises their estrogen levels and it can trigger early onset of puberty as well as period. Young girls are developing and are having their period at nine or ten years old.“

That, she says, is where cancer risk comes in: a recent study co-authored by an SPH researcher linked menstruating at an earlier age to higher rates of an aggressive form of breast cancer in black women.

At the hair salons she visited, Minor says, both hairdressers and clients showed plenty of interest in learning more about how to protect themselves and each other.

But Minor says tackling black women’s chemical exposure also needs to include more discussion around black hair, and the pressure to change its texture in the first place.

“Historically, society has always had negative associations with natural black hair,” she says. “It’s internalized. We make comments of what’s ‘good hair’ and what’s ‘bad hair,’ and young girls are listening.”

She points to the military’s grooming regulations as recently as 2014, a friend with natural hair struggling to be recognized as professional in broadcast journalism, this September’s federal appeals court ruling against a woman fired for her locs, and myriad other examples of bias against black women wearing “their hair in its natural state.”

Minor says we as a society have to both address these pressures and bring more safety and transparency to hair products.

“For the record I’m not anti-perm,” says Minor, who went natural in college. “Do what makes you happy, but be educated. The information should be available so you can make the most informed choice.”

—Michelle Samuels