Black Girl Hair Reparations: We're Allowed To Believe We Deserve

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Last month, we celebrated little Black girls we adored on relaxer boxes in a viral social media thread. Gracing the cover of a perm box is akin to a celebrity figure in the Black community. Much of the inspiration for the beautiful hair of our dreams came from the Black girls who blessed relaxer boxes. 

But what it all meant to us then reveals something far more alarming and unsettling today. While social media asked what happened to the perm box girls, I wondered more than anything, what happened to all the Black girls out there who struggled to look like the girls on the perm boxes? 

Black girl hair more often than not, symbolizes survival, strength, resistance, diversity and celebration. Generations illustrate a cultivating reflection of Black hair from varied and nuanced perspectives. A Black girl’s hair told you a story of who we are from the root. While the importance of our hair represented empowerment, commemoration and appreciation, it was also marked as a tool of targeted criticism, discrimination and oppression.

In the early 1900s, while conducting experiments in his sewing machine shop, Garrett Augustus Morgan discovered a liquid solution that gave his needles a high polish and prevented the fabric from burning as he sewed. Morgan wiped a hard day’s worth of work and solution off onto a wool cloth and the next day discovered the cloth’s smoother texture.

Morgan figured that if the solution could smooth out a wool cloth, then it could potentially duplicate the same effect on hair. After testing the solution on a curly-haired dog, Morgan tried the solution on his own hair. After what he deemed a success, Morgan established G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Company and began selling products in predominately African American communities. 

The idea that it was possible to change the structure of a hair shaft when certain chemicals penetrated it was an invention Morgan couldn’t ignore. However, what may have been a success for businesses and profits, was a deep-seated damage Black hair is still burning to recover from.

 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. 

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As we reminisced about the days we got relaxers in pursuit of simpler hair, the days we leaned over the sink or tub while we heard that if it was burning, it was working, and making sure we didn’t sweat it all out in one day, I also couldn’t help but lament at the revelation that even the girls on the cover of perm boxes didn’t achieve their advertised hair results from the use of relaxers. 

To put it into more contemporary terms: We’d been lyed to our whole lives. 

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Attention: If you or a Black girl you know has been diagnosed with hair traumatization, you are entitled to all the compensation.

In June 2022, we reported on a new study by the City of Hope that found a link to the risk of breast cancer from chemicals in Black hair products. In addition last month, a similar link from chemical hair straightening was found to a high risk of uterine cancer. As a result, 32-year-old Jenny Mitchell filed a lawsuit against L’Oréal and other hair beauty product companies, citing that her uterine cancer was “directly” caused by their hair-straightening products. 

“Society has made it a norm to look a certain way, in order to feel a certain way. And I am the first voice of many voices to come that will stand, stand up to these companies, and say, ‘No more’.”

Black women have long been the subjected victims of chemically dangerous products and many of us are still reeling from such hair traumatic years. More importantly, Black women and girls were used to deceive other Black women and girls with the false belief that they could achieve the advertised results on the cover of perm boxes. 

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), victims of false and misleading advertising can file an advertising lawsuit against the responsible company in court. With mass-market companies such as L’Oreal, Dark and Lovely, and Revlon, the number of victims alone could result in a class action lawsuit, possibly representing millions of consumers. 

Moreover, whether or not companies were aware, consumers are also entitled to compensation for intentionally or recklessly causing emotional, physical, or psychological distress. Not only does hair damage cause physical injury, but also hair trauma. And while this form of distress may prove more difficult to substantiate in court, it does not make the case any less valid or urgent. 

Black women and girls may never recover from the deep-seated damage of chemical hair products, but they do deserve a chance to recover any form of compensation for a product that was falsely advertised and more urgently, caused several forms of trauma and distress. 

One of the crowning glories of a Black woman is the versatility of our hair. We didn’t get it easy, but we got it diligently. Our struggle with hair existed not because it’s bad, but because it’s been traumatized. Over time and through much trial and error, we learned to grow with it, and allow it to run its coarse.

That’s right, I said coarse. 

Source: LaylaBird / Getty

Whether it’s been a decade or yesterday since we last applied a relaxer, the ingrained psychological, emotional, and physical damage caused by chasing a particular hair aesthetic is nothing short of triggering.

The problem was never a need for better hair or that we needed to go to damaging lengths to achieve good hair. The real problem is that chemical relaxer products cheated us of the revelation that our hair was already the goal. And that more than anything, — there are no other lengths to go when our hair had already arrived at its rightful texture and place. 

The recent findings between cancer and Black hair products not only make Black hair injury dangerous but deadly. Black women and girls deserve to be armed with the ability to seek whatever compensation is necessary and available after long being misled and injured by dangerously harmful products. 

Historically, the concept of reparations has been actively proposed as a means of transitional justice and can take many forms such as monetary payments, waiving of debts or fees, affirmative action, national apologies, removal or renaming of any item that honors offenders, and creating systemic initiatives to make amends for injustices. 

Since Black hair chemical relaxer companies became household names due to Black hair consumers, making reparation measures could be the closest offset to a long, deep-rooted injustice. And since most of our hair problems were caused by the ones such companies gave us, we are allowed to believe that we deserve nothing short of all the reparations.

Though a public acknowledgment of damage and distress caused to Black hair by chemical hair companies is rightfully owed, it may never arrive, but it shouldn’t stifle the chase after the compensation we deserve. 

Initiatives such as the natural hair movement have already emerged in a way that has hair relaxer companies punching the air. If such a movement can decline their sales, then the case for reparations should at the very least run them to the extent of rightful extinction. Leaving Black women and girls to chase the best hair aesthetic of them all. 

And that is free from injury and distress. 

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