by Jameelah Mullen
Might 9, 2025
A brand new examine reveals that over half of the Black and Latina ladies surveyed in Los Angeles recurrently use private care merchandise containing a recognized cancer-causing carcinogen.
The journal Environmental Science & Expertise Letters revealed the examine on March 7, revealing that among the many 64 ladies surveyed, 53% reported utilizing shampoos, conditioners, bleaching lotions, eyelash glue, and different merchandise that comprise formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing substances, that are recognized to trigger most cancers in people.
“It’s actually regarding that we’re deliberately placing chemical compounds that launch a carcinogen into our merchandise that we apply to ourselves daily,” Robin Dodson, affiliate director of analysis at Silent Spring Institute, a nonprofit analysis agency finding out the environmental causes of breast most cancers, informed NPR.
Researchers collected the info in 2021 after earlier research indicated that Black and Latina ladies are disproportionately uncovered to formaldehyde in magnificence merchandise in comparison with white ladies. Consultants have suspected that the frequent use of chemical hair relaxers containing formaldehyde-releasing brokers by Black ladies is without doubt one of the the reason why they die of breast, uterine, and ovarian cancers at considerably greater charges than their white counterparts.
In a examine carried out by The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit environmental company, the researchers discovered that out of 4,011 private care merchandise marketed to Black ladies, solely 21% have been rated as low hazard in EWG’s Pores and skin Deep® cosmetics database.
The FDA introduced its plans to suggest a ban on formaldehyde in 2023. The proposed ban was supposed to defend the general public from well being dangers related with chemical use. The company deliberate to implement the proposal in April 2024, however has confronted a number of delays. Final yr, the EWG condemned the FDA for failing to implement the ban.
“Regardless of the overwhelming proof of the hazards of formaldehyde in hair-straightening therapies, the FDA has constantly didn’t act decisively,“ EWG wrote in an announcement.
As of Might 2025, the company has not applied the proposed ban. Europe banned formaldehyde as a beauty ingredient in 2009.
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