Health / Wellness

I Did Not Expect Perms To Be Legally Relevant, Yet Here We Are

I pray that counsel referred to relaxers as ‘creamy crack’ at least once in the brief.

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This is the closest thing I could find for “reaching toward a box of Dark and Lovely.” (Image via Getty)

There is a lot to say about Good Hair and Bad Hair — so much so that you could make a whole documentary about it. The CROWN Act is what immediately comes to mind when I think about Black hair in legal settings, but a new lawsuit is set to change to change that association.

Three lawsuits over hair relaxers made by Revlon, L’Oréal and others join other cases that focus on consumer products targeted to Black women.

The lawsuits—filed in federal courts in New York, California and Illinois—follow an Oct. 17 study from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences that found women who used hair relaxers more than four times a year were more than twice as likely to develop uterine cancer.

Chicago’s DiCello Levitt announced the lawsuits on Monday—two on behalf of women with .

I knew relaxers could be rough on you — there have been associations between relaxers and alopecia, but I didn’t know relaxers could be cancer rough on you. Many folks use perms without knowing the potential long-term effects of them. Plaintiffs are fully aware of this and hope that news of the suit will encourage some hard discussions among the users.

“People change their hair styles and change their look, but when you’re selling a product to alter someone’s hair that creates a higher risk of cancer and fibroids and real, life-altering issues, there’s a problem,” [Diandra] Zimmermann said. “This is a significant moment for a lot of women. And I think that in churches and in schools and in academia, folks are going to be talking about what our lawsuits are about, and about the women in their family who need justice, and the women in their family who used this since they were kids and have these conditions.”

Danielle Mason, who is also part of similar lawsuits, shares awareness of how widespread the impacts of this litigation could be.

“Given the wide variety of injuries, we anticipate this litigation will be very extensive, that it will impact about 70% or more of the African American population, particularly its women”

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The mass tort litigation aims to partially compensate Black women who were harmed by the products specifically marketed to them. Two main things: one, I’m very curious about how these court cases will go down; two, if you’ve been looking for a push to go natural, here’s your sign.

‘There’s a Problem’: Lawsuits in Multiple States Link Hair Care Products to Cancer [Law.com]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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