t was just before Christmas, and eight-year-old Gloria Moraa sat holding a mirror as her aunt painted her curls with chemicals that would straighten every strand. “All the young girls would get matching hairstyles for the holidays, and relaxers were fashionable back then,’’ says Moraa, now 28, who lives in Nairobi,
Tunisia, Kenya and Cameroon were among the countries worldwide leading sales growth for perms and relaxers from 2017 to 2022, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm. Sales in Tunisia and Kenya jumped 10% over the five-year span.‘I did not have the time or the expertise to discern the effects of listed ingredients,’ says Moraa of the relaxers she once used.
Governments should require the disclosure of potential health effects and ban dangerous ingredients, she says.of what it says is the first research about black women’s experiences with relaxers in the UK, surveying more than 1,000 women. Falodun-Liburd was not surprised by the results: 77% of the women were not aware of an increased risk of cancer from long-term use of relaxers.
Cunningham, 75, and her younger daughter, Travias Cunningham-Case, 51, believe endocrine disrupters in the relaxers caused Cunningham-Morris’s death. Both women blame the chemicals for their own hysterectomies: Cunningham’s because of fibroids, and Cunningham-Case’s for endometriosis.