Hair relaxer made Black women beautiful, and made them pay with their health
Chemical hair relaxer built the Black community's earliest millionaire industry and has also been linked by research to elevated uterine cancer risk — the same product is both an economic ladder and a bodily cost.
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Hair relaxer is "creamy crack"
Chemical hair relaxer has a nickname in the salon: creamy crack, because it is said to be as addictive as cocaine — once you start, it is very hard to stop. When you do stop, the new curly growth breaks off where it meets the already straightened dead hair. For a week before use you cannot wash your hair or scratch your scalp, or you will get burned; when applying it you have to avoid the scalp and coat only the hair shaft, but leaving it too long near the ends still stings. In the episode the host recalls being slathered with relaxer for the first time at age 9, having already seen women in the salon cry out in pain.
— Priscilla AlabiFrom African hair tradition to a survival strategy
Hair historian Lorie Tharps says starting the story from slavery is starting from chapter two and missing chapter one: Africa already had rich hair traditions, and hair connected tribe, family, and identity. After being enslaved in America, straightening went from self-expression to survival strategy — because they were told their hair was inferior, ugly, more like an animal's, straightening became a visual way to prove "we are equal to you." They used butter instead of palm oil, made shampoo from cornmeal and kerosene, used butter knives as crude curling irons, and wrapped hair around yarn to straighten it.
— Lorie TharpsBarbers' money built Black colleges
The methods these enslaved people invented were good enough to make them the preferred barbers and wig makers of white people. White people paid for their craft, and this channel let many of them buy their own freedom. Tharps says some early Black colleges and institutions were funded or founded by Black barbers, such as Wilberforce University — an HBCU entirely owned and operated by African Americans, built in large part on barbering income. But the irony is that these Black barbers did not cut Black people's hair at the time; they served white clients.
— Lorie TharpsThe hot comb gave way to an accidental discovery
Madame CJ Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone used the hot comb plus hair oil to produce sleek straight hair, turning scattered straightening methods into a system, and Walker became the first self-made millionaire woman in America, of any race. But the hot comb's effect was temporary — sweat, humidity, or rain restored the original state. In the early 1900s, Cleveland tailor Garrett Augustus Morgan wanted to invent a substance that kept high-speed machines and needles from damaging wool and other animal fur, and after trying a formula he found the fur had straightened. He first tested it on a neighbor's dog, then on his own hair, and both straightened — he had accidentally discovered that lye (sodium hydroxide) plus other things could straighten hair.
— Lorie TharpsThe man who put relaxer on drugstore shelves
George Johnson is called by Tharps the Madam CJ Walker of his era. A barber doing homemade conks came to this chemist and asked whether he could make something fast and easy, and that produced Ultra Wave for men, followed by Ultra Sheen for women. Unlike the temporary hot comb and dangerous homemade lye formulas, Ultra Sheen was long-lasting, safer, and available at any drugstore, no salon needed. That privacy mattered: straightening hair with chemicals carried shame, and doing it at home meant no one saw you going to the salon.
— Lorie TharpsProfits flowed back to the Black community, then regulators took notice
Johnson put profits back into the Black community: Soul Train, Essence Magazine, Chicago's Independence Bank — then the largest Black-owned bank in the country, lending to homeowners and entrepreneurs redlined by white banks; funding Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson; employing hundreds of Black and brown workers who could not find jobs because of racial discrimination, giving them profit sharing, full health insurance, on-site nurses, full college tuition, paid maternity and sick leave, and four-day weekends every holiday. In 1964 Johnson Products became the first Black-owned company listed on the American Stock Exchange. But in 1975 the FTC required Johnson to put a warning label on the outside of relaxer packaging saying the product contained lye and could be harmful — while Revlon's relaxer, which also contained lye, was not immediately required to add a label, a delay of nearly two years.
— Lorie TharpsThe civil rights movement flipped the politics of straight hair
During the Black Power era, Black people decided straight hair had solved nothing — from Madam CJ Walker's straightening comb to relaxer, every method had been tried and it still had not worked. So came a simpler and more radical idea: I will no longer straighten my hair, I will use my hair as protest. Black hair grows up and out; it does not make you smaller, it makes you taller. The political flip was so complete that some Black people with naturally straight hair got perms, because not everyone's hair can grow into an Angela Davis-style afro. But the beauty industry then commodified the afro, selling wigs and marketing it as beauty and empowerment while also pulling its teeth, turning it into just another fashion trend. By the 1980s, straight hair was back.
— Lorie TharpsA 34,000-woman study: risk up two and a half times
A large 2022 study followed 34,000 women and found that frequent users of chemical hair straightening products — most of them Black women — were two and a half times as likely to develop uterine cancer as never-users. New York Times Magazine contributor Linda Varosa says this was the first high-quality study to link straightening products, Black women, and two cancers (endometrial cancer and uterine cancer). The study also linked these products to fibroids, and Black women have fibroids at far higher rates than other women. The study shows correlation, not causation, but Tharps thinks agonizing over correlation versus causation misses the point: she thinks the red flag should simply be waved, with warnings on packaging, labels, and in salons.
— Linda VarosaIn their own words · checked verbatim
I didn't know it then, but I was being initiated into something much bigger than a hairstyle.
Priscilla Alabi2:08
It feels very messed up and um I think it just speaks to the complexity of being black in America. I don't have an answer for you.
Lorie Tharps20:28
I think instead of calling it creamy crack, we should call it creamy cancer.
Lorie Tharps30:39
Figures
| Share of U.S. Black women who have used chemical hair relaxer in their lifetime | 85% to 95% | 2:08 |
| Number of women followed in the NIH study | 34,000 | 28:38 |
| Relative risk of uterine cancer among frequent users of straightening products | 2.5 times | 29:38 |
| Drop in hair relaxer sales, 2008 to 2013 | 26% | 27:38 |
| Change in frequency of relaxer use at Lorine's salon | from about 30 times a week to about 5 times a week | 27:38 |
| Delay before the FTC required Revlon to add a warning label | nearly 2 years | 17:26 |
| Year Johnson Products went public | 1964 | 16:26 |
Glossary
- creamy crack
- A nickname for chemical hair relaxer, because using it is considered as addictive as cocaine.
- lye
- Sodium hydroxide, a corrosive chemical that straightens hair but is dangerous to use directly.
- conk
- A sleek straight hairstyle made with chemical hair relaxer, popularized by jazz musicians in the 1920s.
- HBCU
- Historically Black Colleges and Universities, higher-education institutions established for Black Americans in U.S. history.
- uterine fibroids
- Non-cancerous tumors in the uterus, with a prevalence among Black women far higher than among other women.
How to listen
Listeners interested in the intersection of consumer history, public health, and the racial economy; people in beauty, personal care, or health consumer goods can also see the interaction between regulation and markets.
The last roughly two minutes of production credits can be skipped.