For many, it’s something they started doing as children. But ongoing research is uncovering just how dangerous these products can be and the severe health impacts women who use them are exposed to.

Despite these threats, the products are aggressively marketed towards black women and young girls.

For Tina Estell cutting and styling hair is more than just a job. It’s her passion.

“I’ve been doing hair since I was probably 13,” she said. “I love to make people happy. I love to make them feel pretty from inside out.  When you sit in my chair, you’re going to leave better than what you came.”

Estell still remembers the sensations of her first hair relaxer at age 18.

“When I was wearing relaxers, I would have this scalp condition that would wear my hair out,” she said. “You could literally pull my scalp up.”

At 40 years old, Estell made the decision to stop using relaxers on her hair. But many of her clients requested the service.

“I was the hairstylist dealing with it, and then I was wearing it and doing my own hair with it. So I was being double exposed,” she said.

In Feb. 2021, Estell was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer.

“It was a wake-up call,” she said.

Though it’s not known if Estell’s cancer is connected to her use of relaxers, more research is uncovering just how dangerous the chemicals in the products are.

“Some of them actually have formaldehyde, which is a known toxin and known carcinogen. And there they’re also things like parabens, which are called endocrine disruptors,” Melanie Crutchfield, a breast surgical oncologist for Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis said.

“They’ve been found in the urine of women who get hair relaxers, and they can change the way our body deals with different things,” she said. “Iit can lead to different types of cancers like breast cancer and uterine cancer.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, women who use hair relaxers more than four times a year are more than twice as likely to develop uterine cancer.

It’s led to more than 8,000 hair relaxer lawsuits against cosmetic companies for not warning consumers about the potential health risks of their products.

“That’s what these lawsuits are about,” attorney and physician Dr. Roderick Edmon said. “Did you put a defective product in the stream of the stream of commerce and not do what you should have done in testing to make sure that it was safe? And then once you did get information and evidence that it was unsafe, what did you do then?”

Dr. Edmond currently represents 17 women who have used relaxers to straighten their hair.

“They’re dealing with life threatening diseases. And unfortunately, a number of our clients, just by virtue of their diagnosis and prognosis already, they will succumb and die as a result of these cancers. So it’s been very, very harrowing to them,” he said.

After 16 rounds of chemo and 30 rounds of radiation, Estell is now cancer free.

She said she’s been contacted by an attorney and is part of a class action lawsuit against L’Oreal. She hopes it’ll bring justice to the women impacted.

In the meantime, she’s doing her part by encouraging her clients to go natural and embrace the beauty they were born with.

“We have been so looked upon negatively about our kinky hair, saying it’s not appealing, it doesn’t look good, not appealing for TV and models and all that,” she said. “Me personally, I think we are so beautiful with our kinky and our natural hair. Then I know we are healthier, and that is a big factor to me.”

If something doesn’t seem right, don’t hesitate to reach out to your doctor.

Women with a family history of endometrial cancer should be offered screening annually by age 35.