By Lauren Wolfe
What do beauty products have to do with climate change? There’s the obvious answer: They are laden with petrochemicals that are produced from fossil fuels. But if you’re a woman of color, there’s a more insidious answer.
Social constructs placed on Black women have long led to the use of chemical hair relaxers, many of which contain lye, which is so corrosive, “it almost always damages the skin of people who are having their hair permed,” writes Victoria St. Martin, a reporter for Inside Climate News.
“Chemical burns on a young Black girl’s scalp,” Heather McTeer Toney, a former regional administrator with the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview with the outlet, “was a rite of passage.”
Decades of the use of relaxers — or even skin lighteners — can have severely adverse effects on health, according to new research from Boston University’s Black Women’s Health Study. The research suggests that even the moderate use of chemical relaxers may increase Black women’s risk of uterine cancer as they reach menopause. Women who reported using relaxers more than twice a year for more than five years, the study found, had a greater than 50 percent risk of uterine cancer.
Now add in the fact that there are racial disparities in how women are geographically impacted by climate change. Many studies have found that Black women, in particular, are disproportionally more likely to live near noxious fuel plants and therefore more likely to suffer the increased risks of respiratory and other illnesses, and even death. These disparities are due to many factors, including racism within the housing market (redlining) and a lack of access to health care in poorer communities.
Then consider that often shampoos and lotions loaded with petrochemicals are used to treat skin issues caused by the chemicals’ very production, and you begin to see how sinister the environmental harms to Black women truly are.
“If you live right in the shadow of a plant, not only are you dealing with the pollution that’s coming from that plant, but it could have an impact on your skin,” said McTeer Toney. “And then the products that you need to treat that include toxic chemicals.”
And even as the world attempts to turn away from the fuels that feed climate change, “essentially fossil fuel companies are putting more investment into petrochemicals, which then show up as plastics, and trying to increase plastic consumption,” said Columbia University professor Ami Zota in another interview with Inside Climate News.
The harmful loop goes on and on.
Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to reflect that Victoria St. Martin is the author of the two Inside Climate News stories, and Ami Zota’s name has been changed.
