Over 10,000 Women Now Allege That Toxic Chemicals in Hair Relaxers Gave Them Cancer - Consumer Reports (2025)

This article is part of Consumer Reports’ Beauty Justice series, which launched with our tests for chemicals and contaminants in synthetic braiding hair products and a campaign to get toxic chemicals out of them.

Drugstore shelves and beauty salon supply rooms are bursting with products promising to straighten, strengthen, smooth, shine, curl, or otherwise tame women’s hair. Some of the processes can be unpleasant, but over their lives many women come to accept the idea that pain can be the price of beauty.

Particularly for Black people, this uneasy negotiation starts young. White-centric beauty norms, along with a desire for hair that is more manageable, have led many Black women and girls to use chemical relaxers—also called perms—from childhood on.

Many women who grew up having their hair chemically straightened say they always knew the ingredients in perms were harsh. They had a noxious smell. They burned their scalps. But while they may have dreaded the process, which could take hours every couple of months, they say they had no idea it could be putting their health at risk.

Now many are beginning to reconsider that assumption of safety. In 2022, a National Institutes of Health study showed that women who frequently used hair relaxers were at higher risk for uterine cancer than women who did not use these products. The study data included over 33,000 women participating in the Sister Study, which followed over 50,000 women for more than a decade. It found that women who used hair relaxers had a 2½ times greater chance of developing the disease than those who did not.

These findings came on the heels of many earlier but smaller studies that correlated hair relaxer use with other reproductive-system problems, including uterine fibroids, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and an earlier onset of puberty for girls.

The alleged culprits, according to the researchers, are parabens, phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA), and other “endocrine disrupting” chemicals in hair relaxers that can affect the development of the body’s hormone system, thus contributing to certain hormone-related health problems, including reproductive cancers. Some of the products also contain formaldehyde—another carcinogenic chemical—or release it into the air when heated.

An earlier study in 2018 by Silent Spring Institute had identified dozens of endocrine-disrupting ingredients in Black hair-care products, many of which were not listed on the product labels. The Food and Drug Administration still allows dozens of ingredients in cosmetics to be unlisted if they are categorized as “fragrance,” which safety advocates say is a loophole that allows manufacturers to hide the presence of toxic chemicals.

The manufacturers of hair relaxers say that these scientific studies don’t specifically implicate their products, or even any specific ingredients. They say that correlation between hair relaxer use and cancer does not imply causation. But the growing body of scientific research that suggests that certain chemicals in hair relaxers are harmful has caused many women to examine their personal histories with these treatments over so many years.

A large number of them—10,100 and counting—have filed lawsuits against hair relaxer companies to claim the chemicals in their products put them at risk. The companies include L’Oréal (which owns Dark & Lovely and SoftSheen-Carson), Revlon, Strength of Nature (the maker of Just for Me and African Pride relaxers), and many others that made relaxers to use at home or in salons.

To help other women avoid the same possible danger, three women who are part of the litigation share their experiences—about the normalization of chemical hair straightening in their youth, about the challenge of being diagnosed with and treated for cancer, and about what they hope, and fear, the future holds, for themselves and for other Black women who struggle with choices surrounding beauty and health. —Lauren Kirchner

[Interviews have been condensed for length and edited for clarity.]

Unfortunately, once you have cancer, you’re high risk no matter what. I have to just check for any lumps, bumps, anything that doesn’t look normal. I have to get blood tests done to make sure everything’s okay. It’s pretty much just living on the edge every day of your life. I live on the edge because I don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring. I’m grateful that God chose me to be here, because a lot of people didn’t make it.

My health isn’t the best. Because of the cancer, my hormones are crazy. Like, I don’t have hair on my head, but I have facial hair. My hormones are out of whack. I unfortunately will go into menopause early, due to having the hysterectomy early in age.

I would have never thought that a product you use on your body would be dangerous. We never talked about it, we never thought that. There were no warnings on the box to be found. No one ever came out and said, “Hey, this is not okay. Your body’s not going to accept this.” It was never brought up.

[The manufacturers] should be ashamed of themselves. They should know how hard it is for people, and how we are out here suffering. Even years later, I’m still suffering. Years later, I still question, “Why me?” I still relive that moment, that day, that second, I got that phone call. Thirty-two, that’s young! No one should ever have to face this at 32. I can’t have no children. You know how bad I want a child? I want a child so bad. One child, that I can leave behind when I am going home to God. And I cannot do that. I cannot carry a child. I cannot leave my legacy on this Earth. It is a battle that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

I had really curly hair going to school, and I wanted straight hair. That was the thing. So my mom started me with using relaxers. The majority of my friends used perms as well. My hair is like, overly curly, it was hard to manage. So the relaxers were like a fix-it-all. It’s just something in our culture that we grow up doing, putting in a perm to make things easier. Pretty much everyone wore them.

It was not a pleasing process, but it was like, beauty is pain. Sometimes that burning could be pretty intense. But you’re just like, okay, we’re going to suck this up and go through it, so we can have this pretty, straight hair. We were kinda trained to think that this was something that we needed to do.

I was driving in a car, and I heard [about the Sister Study] on the radio. That was the first time I heard about it. I can’t say that I was angry, because I’ve already dealt with all of those emotions when I went through the cancer. But there was a lot of regret, in thinking that this was something that I caused, because of something that I used.

I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I went through. I’ve always been this, like, strong person, this strong woman, like I’ve always been, like, strong-minded. That broke me. Like I said, I had regret when I first heard that—like, I just put myself through this? Because I wanted to have pretty hair?

So, your hair is pretty. It is pretty in its natural state. In our culture, we just, we see it, we think it’s supposed to help, not knowing that it has all these damaging effects to it. And so if I can just help spread the word of that, and potentially, you know, save people from having to go through all that, my job is done.

The crux of the litigation is that the hair relaxer manufacturers were not fully transparent with customers about the potential health harms of the products’ more toxic ingredients, the plaintiffs’ attorneys say; these women used these products on their bodies for many years because the products’ packaging and marketing led them to believe that they were safe.

“This litigation is in no way a referendum on a person’s choice as to how they want to wear their hair—anybody should show up in the world however they want to,” says Tope Leyimu, an attorney at a law firm, Motley Rice, that represents many of the plaintiffs. “But people can only make an informed choice when they know what the potential harmful ramifications are.”

In pretrial filings, the hair-relaxer manufacturers have denied the plaintiffs’ allegations, and have argued that there isn’t sufficient information to prove these women’s illnesses were directly caused by their use of the companies’ products. When CR contacted the manufacturers for comment, none responded.

More women are signing on to the litigation all the time, the Motley Rice attorneys say. They are among several law firms representing current and future plaintiffs in this litigation.

While the issue plays out in the courts, federal regulators and state lawmakers are also taking steps to make hair relaxers and other personal care products safer.

The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates cosmetics, proposed a ban on formaldehyde and other formaldehyde-releasing chemicals from hair straighteners and hair smoothing products in 2023. However, after several delays and a White House executive order earlier this year pausing new regulations, the proposed ban’s future is unclear.

Meanwhile, legislators at the state and federal levels have also been working on this issue. Thirteen states have already adopted bills aiming to address toxic chemicals in personal care products, with more in progress. New York is currently considering its own Beauty Justice Act, citing Sister Study findings, that would identify and prohibit harmful chemicals in personal care products sold in the state, including hair relaxers.

There may be some federal action too. Prior versions of the Safer Beauty Bill Package, a group of proposed laws that would enhance the FDA’s oversight of toxic ingredients in the cosmetics industry, were endorsed by over 100 advocacy organizations. According to safety experts working on these federal bills, this package may be reintroduced in Congress in the coming weeks.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to worry about potentially poisoning themselves when choosing their beauty products,” says Alexandra Grose, CR’s senior policy counsel for sustainability. “Yet that’s exactly what’s happening today because our safety rules for cosmetics—including those marketed to Black women—are weak or nonexistent. States and the federal government should enact new laws to hold manufacturers accountable and give consumers peace of mind about these products.”

Heidi Parks has her own way of putting it. “Obviously there’s always going to be a need for women for hair relaxers, if people want to change their hair—and they should be able to—but they should also feel like it’s a safe product,” she says. She adds that she thinks hair relaxer packaging should spell out all of the products’ ingredients and their potential health risks: “Just like back in the day with the cigarette manufacturers, so you can make an educated choice.”