Brazilian Hair Straightening - Health Concerns

Health Concerns

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warns that Brazilian Blowouts are hazardous to the health of the women who use them and the hairdressers who apply them.

Concerns over the presence of formaldehyde in various hair smoothing products at significant concentrations centered whether methylene glycol could legally be synonymous with formaldehyde. Anhydrous formaldehyde gas readily dissolves in and reacts with water to form an equilibrium solution of methylene glycol. When heated, the equilibrium shifts and favors the production of formaldehyde and water. Thus, the manufacturer of Brazlian Blowout argued that methylene glycol is in their products, not formaldehyde, and therefore they can claim that their product was formaldehyde-free. The first involves nomenclature. The second issue is the method by which formaldehyde concentration is measured. The third involves measurements of formaldehyde concentration in bottles of the product in which the reported concentration is dependent upon both the method of measurement and nomenclature. However, the company reached a settlement with the state of California and is no longer claiming their products are formaldehyde free.

Read more about this topic:  Brazilian Hair Straightening

Famous quotes containing the words health and/or concerns:

    The first year was critical to my assessment of myself as a person. It forced me to realize that, like being married, having children is not an end in itself. You don’t at last arrive at being a parent and suddenly feel satisfied and joyful. It is a constantly reopening adventure.
    —Anonymous Mother. From the Boston Women’s Health Book Collection. Quoted in The Joys of Having a Child, by Bill and Gloria Adler (1993)

    By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.
    Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)