Making The Case For Black Girl Hair Reparations
What do bleach, paint thinners and hair relaxers all have in common?
Initially described as a lotion or cream generally used to relax or chemically straighten hair, relaxers’ most active agents are the use of alkali, sodium hydroxide, lye and ammonium thioglycolate, also known as “perm salt,” which can also be found in oven cleaners, paint and soap. Given that relaxers are used to alter the natural hair texture, these chemicals often cause stripping, thinning, and breakage to hair and scalp.
Though relaxer products were made available in the African American community as early as the 1900s, the evolution of relaxers became a popular trend in the ’90s when Black women and girls began to grace the cover of perm boxes.
Brand companies such as Dark and Lovely, Luster’s PCJ, Soft & Beautiful, and African Pride Dream Kids Olive Miracle employed Black female models to represent the face of their products. The utilization of Black women and girls catered to our market for achieving beautiful and aesthetically pleasing hair.
So yes, representation arrived, but it didn’t save us. Underneath the representation were products forceful enough to strip floors, and strong enough to destroy body tissues and form diseases.
In February 2012, I purchased a relaxer after trying a month’s attempt of maintaining my natural hair. Seconds after applying the relaxer I knew I had made an irreversible mistake. My hair suffered severe damage from the chemicals which ultimately caused major breakage.
My hair hadn’t just gone bad— it was traumatized from many relaxer applications before, and in several other places, so was I. As my mom helped me wash out the relaxer and tried to assure me that my hair would grow back, I realized two things:
1. As badly as the goal was to look like the girls on the perm boxes, subjecting myself to hair damage proved the goal to be unreachable
2. A head full of hair — no matter the texture — was better than broken hair.
Source: Heritage Images / Getty
