The truth about Beauty: Black hair & Relaxers

The Beauty industry is a huge enterprise which gathers its income of the backs of self-conscious women and men from around the world.I've looked into it and have seen how some beauty regimes have a damaging effect on its consumers...

*Dun dun duuuun*

This week: Hair Relaxing

Forget sprawling on your sofa watching Friends re-runs and slurping on your hot cocoa, I mean the chemical method of permanently straightening hair used predominantly by black women (but it can be used by all races) Its main ingredient is Hydrogen Peroxide (H202) which is most commonly used as a bleach!

Relaxers change natural hair like this…

…to this; Irreversibly, poker straight hair.

Yes the stuff you use to bleach your toilet is being slathered on people’s heads for beauty?

Other ingredients include:

· Sodium hydroxide

· Calcium hydroxide

· Phosphoric acid

· Ammonium hydroxide

It doesn’t sound safe at all especially as relaxer ingredients can enter the body through scalp lesions and burns. Because manufacturers are not required to list all ingredients, these products may contain unknown harmful substances which can be more dangerous.

Common side effects include:

• Chemical burns
• Irritation
• Red scalp
• Receding hairline

After many years of using relaxers you can become susceptible to baldness, severe scalp irritation and dry, brittle hair.

I’ve had my hair relaxed since I was a teen so I understand the bad side of it. Yes you would get super straight hair and, as its main chemical is bleach, it would lighten your hair colour but you would also get a really tender scalp after your sessions and in-between I was left with a dry, itchy scalp.my hair always grew but due to the constant breakage of my relaxed hair, I was lucky if I could scrape it into a ponytail!

The Relaxing process: The hairdresser will wear thick gloves and slather the thick relaxer which reeked of chemicals onto your regrowth (untreated natural hair). If it started to burn, ding, it was time to rinse it out and fast! It would take about 4 washes to get all traces of the relaxer out. a special shampoo was used that made the bubbles turn pink if there was still relaxer in your hair. If it was left on too long it would actually burn your head in patches, leaving you with, sore areas and sometimes scabs could form.

Doesn’t sound very beautiful now!

You could say the media is to blame with all its focus on perfectly straight, long, silky hair. Luckily Chris Rock addressed this by hosting a documentary called Good Hair which looked into some of the measures black women would go through in order to get perfect locks. Most of it was about Relaxers.

They even got a scientist who was shocked and scared that woman would put the chemicals listed above on their hair, especially after he showed us how a metal can disintegrated within a few hours of being in a cup of Hydrogen Peroxide…the main ingredient in a Relaxer!!

Now why would you want to change this?

Soo cute! :)

I had my last relaxer last September and I’m so glad I’ve stopped. My hair is now healthier and all natural!