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Right now I’m wearing braiding hair that may be exposing me to lead.

According to a new analysis from Consumer Reports, the braiding hair currently installed on my head—Ywigs Water Wave Bulk human hair—contained the highest lead levels of any braiding hair they tested.

That doesn’t mean the braiding hair on my head is actively poisoning me. But it does raise some questions: How did potentially dangerous products like this make it onto store shelves in the first place? And why are millions of Black women buying hair products that are not being regulated by the Food and Drug Administration? 

If the lead and other chemicals detected in braiding hair pose a health risk, we deserve to know. And if it doesn’t, we deserve clear answers about that too.

Black women shouldn’t have to figure it out ourselves while navigating beauty standards that have spent generations telling us the way our hair grows out of our heads needs to be changed to fit in.

That’s certainly why I begged my mother for a relaxer for years.

She finally relented when I was 12. I was ecstatic.

Relaxers promise straight hair. Straight hair meant fewer questions, fewer stares, and fewer moments where your hair suddenly becomes the most interesting thing about you.

“Your hair is so cool.”

White folks become amateur anthropologists, grasping at your hair, and studying you the way people once studied Black bodies in human zoos.

As comedian Paul Mooney put it in the documentary Good Hair, “If your hair is relaxed, they are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they are not happy.”

So for the next decade, I did what a lot of Black girls do: I relaxed my hair. It burned like hell which should have been a........

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