Marvin Joseph/WASHINGTON POST - Authorities say the heat from straightening irons and blow-dryers can turn the ingredients in hair smoothers into formaldehyde, now considered a carcinogen.
When Adelia Varga visited Brazil four years ago, she tried a hair smoothing product and couldn’t believe how it tamed her wild, curly hair. She brought it back to the Rockville salon where she works and now regularly uses a similar treatment on herself and her clients.
“My hair looks so healthy,” Varga, 38, said recently as another stylist dabbed the white liquid on her brunette hair. “My hair is usually frizzy and bushy. Now it is silky and bouncy.”
(Marvin Joseph/WASHINGTON POST) - Mahshid Hosseini has her hair styled by Adelia Varga, a fan of a smoothing product she found in Brazil four years ago.
Health officials say such smoothing products, often known as Brazilian treatments, may pose a hazard to stylists and users alike. That’s because most of them contain formaldehyde or chemicals that release formaldehyde, which has been identified as a cancer risk.
In its annual report on carcinogens, the National Toxicology Program this year reclassified formaldehyde from a probable carcinogen to a known one.
Several companies that make formaldahyde-based hair smoothing products are under investigation or have been cited for violations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or the Food and Drug Administration for false advertising about their products, and for exposing workers to formaldehyde above legally allowable levels.
The Cosmetic Ingredient Review, a panel funded by the cosmetics industry and backed by the FDA, recently stated that, “in the present practices of use and concentration . . . hair smoothing products containing formaldehyde and methylene glycol are unsafe.” The problems noted were high concentration of the chemical, overuse of the hair product and inadequate ventilation during application.
Formaldehyde is a colorless, usually strong-smelling chemical that has been in use for about 70 years as a preservative and binding agent. Think frog floating in a science-class jar, corpses, particleboard, carpets, glue, cosmetics — and hair products.
Formaldehyde can be an irritant and an allergen. Some people’s eyes tear, their noses run and their throats burns. Some experience more-extreme reactions, such as coughing, wheezing or even asthmalike symptoms. And there have been cases of hair loss and vomiting from hair products with high levels of formaldehyde.
As a result, said David Andrews, a scientist for the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, “these [hair] products have been banned in Europe, Canada and Australia.”
OSHA does not regulate the amount of formaldehyde in hair products used in salons. It does, though, stipulate that the air in a salon have no more than 0.75 parts of formaldehyde per million parts (ppm) during an eight-hour shift and no more than 2 ppm during any 15-minute period. Formaldehyde is released into the air when a stylist dries a client’s treated hair with a blow-dryer or straightening iron.
“Our responsibility is to ensure the workplace is free of hazard,” said OSHA’s top official, David Michaels. “Formaldehyde is a hazard.” He estimates that there are 75,000 salons in the United States and about 500,000 people who work in them. OSHA does not track how many of the salons use formaldehyde-based smoothers.
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