JoAnna Zackery wanted the bone straight hair that flowed flawlessly on the Black women she saw on television. It was 1990 and the 21-year-old went to a salon to put chemical hair relaxer for the first time on her coils.
“Everybody was getting it,” Zackery said. “It was beautiful to see straight hair, and I wanted it. I wanted to try it.”
For more than 30 years Zackery chemically straightened her curls every four to six weeks. Then in September 2023 Zackery’s doctor found cancer growing in the lining of her uterus. Her doctor delivered the devastating news: Her entire uterus along with both ovaries and fallopian tubes needed to be removed.
Zackery is among the more than 600 plaintiffs who have filed lawsuits in Georgia against cosmetic companies that sold chemical hair relaxers. The women allege they developed various cancers, including uterine and ovarian, or benign tumors in their reproductive systems after using the companies’ products, including some brands based in Georgia.
The plaintiffs say the hair relaxers caused their cancer, according to court records. They allege they were misled by the companies’ advertisements that showed models with sleek hair and product packaging that said the relaxers were nourishing, healthy or organic.
“For years, Black women have been marketed certain products, and these manufacturers are not fully transparent for the long-term health risks,” said Zackery, who lives in Fairburn, Georgia.
Georgia now has the largest concentration of hair relaxer litigation outside of Illinois, where over 10,000 cancer cases have been consolidated from across the country in a federal court, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of court filings over the past three years shows.
A year before Zackery’s cancer diagnosis, researchers with the National Institutes of Health had published a study showing women who frequently used hair straightening products, including relaxers, were more than twice as likely to develop uterine cancer as those who did not.
The 2022 study set off the shock wave of litigation nationally, with Georgia becoming a hotbed of activity as the home of several cosmetic companies.
Popular brands of hair relaxers marketed to Black consumers like Just for Me, African Pride, Motions, Soft & Beautiful and others made by Strength of Nature, which is based in Savannah, are among the targets of the litigation.
In an online statement the company said that it follows all regulations: “We are confident that our products are safe and believe that our mention in the lawsuits is unmerited.” Strength of Nature did not respond to the AJC’s requests for comment.
Bronner Bros., a Black and family-owned Georgia business, has also been named as a defendant. The company said in a statement that it is taking women’s concerns in the lawsuits very seriously, but “we believe the allegations made against Bronner Bros. and our relaxer products are unfounded, and that our relaxer products will be shown to be 100% safe when directions on the label are followed.”
Bronner Bros. said the last hair relaxers produced for the company were in 2022 and the company no longer sells them.
Other Georgia-based cosmetic companies, including House of Cheatham and McBride Research Laboratories, are named as defendants and did not respond to requests for interviews.
Some of the Georgia cases could go to trial as early as 2026. But first the Georgia Supreme Court is expected to decide this year whether some of the women’s lawsuits can proceed. At issue is a state law that generally shields companies from liability 10 years after a product is first purchased. In many cases, the women used the hair products decades before they sued.
“The way the statute is drafted is awkward, to say the least, in trying to capture the idea of cumulative exposure of a commercial product,” Justice Sarah Hawkins Warren said during oral arguments in May.
Black women weigh cosmetic health risks
Aigner Kolom said almost all the Black women — mother, sister, cousin — in her life straightened their hair when she was growing up in Missouri. Her first perm to chemically straighten her hair was at age 12 and she continued to relax her hair up until a year before law school graduation in 2015.
Kolom is now an attorney with Beasley Allen law firm. She represents dozens of women in Georgia, most of them Black, who said they used hair relaxers and later developed cancer. In stacks of lawsuits filed in DeKalb and Chatham counties, the women’s lawyers cite the 2022 report and other recent studies that found associations between hair relaxers and cancer. The women reported needing hysterectomies or the complete removal of their reproductive organs. These cases hit close to home for Kolom.
“Almost all of our plaintiffs look like me,” Kolom said. “They have mothers that look like me, sisters, cousins. So of course, it is personal, especially considering the fact that all of these products that they used — some of them, I used myself.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Kizzey Wilson is among Kolom’s clients who say they’ve been harmed by hair relaxers. Wilson, 46, started using the products in middle school to smooth her hair when it would get kinky.
“My mama always used it, so of course I grew up doing the same thing,” Wilson said.
Wilson is raising two teenage boys on her own in Macon. The past decade has been tough on the family. Doctors found cancer growing in the lining of Wilson’s uterus in 2016 and she had a hysterectomy. That surgery to contain the cancer ended Wilson’s dream of having a daughter.
“I never got a chance to have my little girl,” said Wilson. “They took my womanhood.”
The cancer came back nearly six years ago as doctors found it growing between Wilson’s kidney and bladder and in her liver and lungs. She was in and out of the hospital for chemotherapy, radiation and to treat infections. She said she’s still fighting for her life today. As a last ditch effort, she enrolled in a clinical trial in Atlanta at the Emory Winship Cancer Institute.
“Relaxers are the reason why I went through so much hell,” Wilson said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The first modern chemical hair relaxer products entered the market as early as the 1950s, but they were made with caustic ingredients, such as lye, that irritated the scalp and damaged the hair, according to a 2018 book by Patrick Obukowho that explores the science and history of hair relaxers.
From the 1970s through the 1980s, no-lye hair relaxing products were introduced and pitched as a safer and less damaging alternative. It revolutionized the industry and led to a wave of new marketing efforts geared toward Black women.
But decades later, a growing body of scientific research has begun to cast a shadow over the multibillion dollar U.S. hair care market.
Hair products used by Black women contained dozens of hormone-disrupting and asthma-associated chemicals, and many of the ingredients were not listed on the products’ packaging, researchers found in 2018. In 2021, scientists found that women who frequently use hair straightening, relaxing or pressing products are approximately twice as likely to develop ovarian cancer. Then researchers with the NIH came out with the 2022 study that found evidence of an association between hair straighteners and uterine cancer.
The scientists acknowledge that more research is needed around the risks associated with specific ingredients in the products and how different races are affected.
Uterine cancer is the fourth most common cancer in U.S. women with nearly 14,000 women expected to die from the disease this year, according to the NIH. Black women are disproportionately impacted as they have the highest rate of deaths from the disease among all races.
These developments have caught the eye of Georgia state Rep. Inga Willis, a Fulton County Democrat, who sits on the consumer affairs committee. In April, she proposed a study committee to review the health risks of using hair straightening products, including chemical hair relaxers. Her resolution did not gain traction in the General Assembly, but she hopes to revisit the proposal next session.
“I don’t think this is just a Black woman’s issue,” she said, “but I do think it is a huge issue for us.”
‘She permed her hair’
Black hair care is an informal education passed down between generations of women. It’s from grandma, fetching a jar of Blue Magic hair grease and heating up a hot comb on the stove. It’s mom, sitting a daughter on the floor in front of her chair, nestled between her knees while she separates hair into sections for a relaxer. It’s the “bump” at the ends of straight hair.
Like many Black Georgia families, perming each other’s hair was a loving, intergenerational activity for Kieyana Grant. Now her family is tangled in the litigation as they grapple with the idea that the hair straightening products they used may have caused her grandmother’s cancer.
Annie Ruth Williams’ teenage years were spent in southwest Georgia in the small town of Dawson. Her mother had lived to be 105, and Williams herself was a healthy person, mother to five children, who worked in a warehouse before becoming a full-time homemaker in Atlanta.
Sundays were for church and hair. Williams would worship at the Greater Piney Grove Baptist Church in southeast Atlanta before welcoming her daughter and granddaughters back to her home in Kirkwood. Her kitchen — a place overflowing with homemade peach cobbler, butter rolls and deviled eggs — transformed into a salon.
“Getting perms seemed like it was a delicacy,” said Grant, 34, who often joined Williams in the kitchen to perm her hair.
Credit: Courtesy of Kieyana Grant
Credit: Courtesy of Kieyana Grant
Williams opened boxes of chemical hair relaxers, slathered cool grease across her neck and scalp, and then applied the white chemical mixture to her roots until her head felt like it was burning. She doused the invisible fire in the kitchen sink.
For nearly 60 years, Williams chemically straightened her textured hair with multiple brands of hair relaxers sold at beauty supply stores and convenience stores. Williams applied the perm to herself, or sometimes she asked Grant to help. She followed the instructions on the boxes, Grant said.
“She did not play about not perming her hair,” Grant said. “She permed her hair every chance she got.”
Then in 2021, Williams began to bleed. The 80-year-old widow knew that she couldn’t be menstruating, and an OB-GYN oncologist discovered cancer in the lining of her uterus. Doctors determined that Williams needed chemotherapy and radiation.
The next two years, Williams was in and out of the hospital, hospice, a nursing home and Grant’s home. The cancer treatments caused her hair to fall out.
“I always told her no matter what state her hair is in, it’s beautiful. Just like she is beautiful,” Grant said.
Williams died of uterine cancer on July 11, 2023, death records show.
Her ashes rest in the bedroom of Grant’s home in Lithonia where Williams lived with her granddaughter in the final months of her life. Immediately after reading about the 2022 NIH study that hair straightening products could be associated with uterine cancer, the family began to question if that could be true in Williams’ case. In March, Grant filed a lawsuit on behalf of Williams’ estate against multiple cosmetic companies.
“They definitely should not be on the shelves, especially them knowing the types of ingredients and chemicals that they have in the relaxers,” Grant said.
Hidden fragrances, unavoidable traces
Pick up a box of hair relaxer in a drugstore and there is a panel with a long list of chemicals used to break and reform the hair’s protein structure from coily to straight. But what may be missing from those labels is now under scrutiny.
Plaintiffs in Georgia and beyond allege that cosmetic companies did not disclose on the packaging that the hair relaxers contained hormone-disrupting ingredients, including phthalates (pronounced tha-layts). They claim in the lawsuits that the companies had a responsibility to disclose these potentially dangerous ingredients and design safer hair relaxer products.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates cosmetics, does not limit the use of phthalates in cosmetics and does not have safety concerns about a form of the chemical commonly used in cosmetic fragrances. Many of the studies cited on the FDA website are more than 20 years old.
Phthalates help elongate the fragrance’s scent. But in the body, the chemical is almost identical to estrogen, which can increase the risk of women developing fibroids or hormone-sensitive cancers, like uterine cancer, said Dr. John Lipman, an interventional radiologist with the Atlanta Fibroid Center.
Studies have shown that phthalates harm the reproductive system, said Dr. Leyte Winfield, the director of Spelman College’s cosmetic science program.
“When we started using hair relaxers, we did believe that they were safe. And then over time, we did not keep pace with making sure that we did the follow-through studies,” Winfield said.
The 2022 NIH study about uterine cancer as well as recent scientific studies that measured other hormone disrupting chemicals in pregnant women show the need for more research, Winfield said.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Cosmetic companies deny that their products are toxic or unsafe, and criticize the 2022 NIH study, court records show. They argue the study did not attribute the heightened risk of cancer to specific brands and lumped all hair straightening products together.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
“The novel study upon which all these lawsuits is based recognized the need for further research and it made no finding of a causal connection between the use of those products and any conditions alleged by the plaintiffs,” a spokesperson for L’Oreal told the AJC.
L’Oreal is among the major cosmetic companies outside of Georgia that plaintiffs have targeted in their state lawsuits. The company and its subsidiary SoftSheen-Carson sell popular Black hair care brands such as Dark & Lovely and Mizani.
“Our highest priority is the health and well-being of all our consumers,” the company’s spokesperson said. “Our products are subject to a rigorous scientific evaluation of their safety by experts who also ensure that we strictly follow all regulations in every market in which we operate.” The companies said the lawsuits did not have merit.
L’Oreal says on its website that it does not use phthalates in its products. But it also acknowledges that phthalates “may be present in technically unavoidable traces. The presence of these traces at safe levels is managed within a global system of safety and quality standards and complies with regulatory requirements.”
The FDA rules do not require fragrance ingredients to be included on product labels. The agency also does not mandate premarket testing of cosmetics or their ingredients; instead, companies are responsible for ensuring their products are safe, according to the FDA.
M. Brandon Smith, an Atlanta lawyer representing plaintiffs with hair relaxer claims, said that cosmetic companies should disclose their fragrance ingredients. The FDA sets the minimum guidelines for cosmetic labels, but they’re not the gold standard, Smith said.
“The FDA provides floors, not ceilings,” he said. “(Companies) certainly have the ability to do more, and should do more in certain instances.”
California regulators have tried to crack the black box of cosmetics ingredients that can cause cancer or be toxic to the reproductive system with mandated reporting by companies through the California Safe Cosmetics Program for nearly 20 years.
In 2020, California state Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi sponsored the Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act that goes a step further and bans 24 chemicals, including two types of phthalates, from being sold in cosmetics in California. The law took effect this year.
“American consumers currently are not protected,” Muratsuchi said. “These are things that we put in our bodies and put on our hair, put on our skin, many containing intentionally added toxic chemicals.”
In 2023, a cohort of six Georgia Democrat representatives — all Black women — proposed legislation to require manufactures to report cosmetic ingredients to the state, including more than a dozen “restricted substances.” The proposal went nowhere.
Why women relax their coils
Discrimination and characterization of Black hair as “unattractive, unprofessional and inferior” contribute to Black women choosing to chemically straighten their hair to meet European standards of beauty, many of the lawsuits allege.
To better understand how Black women are navigating societal expectations, personal preferences and reports about health risks associated with some hair products, the AJC interviewed nearly a dozen Black women across metro Atlanta. None are involved in the litigation.
Sheryl Freeman said she felt pressure to straighten her hair early in her career as a prosecutor. She used relaxers and worried that a more natural look would distract juries from the effectiveness of her job.
“I wanted to make sure that say, for instance, if I had a jury trial, that I wouldn’t have people looking at my hair or judging my argument based on my hair,” she said.
It wasn’t until Freeman saw a judge wearing braids that she felt comfortable wearing other hair styles in the courtroom. Freeman has worn her natural hair, occasionally in braids, for more than 10 years.
Ianna Janke, a beautician in Clarkston, said some clients continue to choose relaxers for the product’s cost and ease in maintaining their hair styles.
“I think more people can manage their hair better that do get relaxers,” she said. “It’s an incentive for them, because they can maintain their hair better when their texture is a little bit less intense.”
That’s why Darnell M. Taylor, 56, has used relaxers since she was 18. She says she uses a sensitive relaxer formula. She has her stylist perm her hair in a pixie cut, so she can lay it flat and keep her day moving.
“I just had her cut it real low,” she said. “Low maintenance.”
Some women are steering away from relaxers.
Atlanta twins, Marlean and Murlean Tucker, went from relaxers to their natural hair several years ago. They were tired of their scalps itching and burning or their hair falling out from the chemicals. News reports about cancer risks associated with Black hair care products have made them grateful they stopped.
“You’ve got to wonder, if that stuff is seeping into your scalp, anything that touches your skin can go in,” Murlean Tucker said.
But a Black woman’s decision to chemically straighten her hair is not always motivated by aesthetics; it can be a means of survival in the face of discrimination. It is illegal in about half of states to discriminate on the basis of a person’s hair texture or for wearing protective styles in the workplace and public schools. Georgia has no such protection statewide.
A handful of Georgia counties and towns have passed laws protecting the right to wear natural hair styles, but in wide swaths of the state no such protection exists for students and workers.
The long wait
JoAnna Zackery went into remission on April 8, 2024. She is trying to use the years ahead of her to be an advocate for other women facing cancer.
During Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, Zackery’s church brought survivors of cancer to the altar. Zackery stood among them.
Despite trying to look ahead, in some ways, she’s stuck in a perpetual state of waiting. She’s waiting for her civil case and hundreds of others against the cosmetic companies to move forward. She waits for biweekly test results to ensure her body has healed properly, without scarring. She awaits annual scans that will tell her if her cancer has returned.
She’s learning to live with uncertainty that will never go away.
“I’m scared,” Zackery said. “I pray that nothing comes up. I don’t ever want to hear that word again. But I had cancer, and that’s never going to change.”
Credit: YouTube
Credit: YouTube
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