Health And Beauty Updates: Products Used By Black Women Contains More Dangerous Chemicals, Study Proves

A recent study has just found out that hair and skin beauty products mostly used by black women have a tendency to have more dangerous chemicals. Most of the products are usually used on hair and skin. The study also compared the results to general products being sold to the market, which 40 percent of these fall in the same category.  

According to Time, most of the beauty products claimed to contain harmful chemicals is hair relaxers and hair dyes, as reported by the Environmental Working Group. The group has tested a total of 1,177 products being sold to black women and based on the Skin Deep database which ranks the safety of beauty products, only 25 percent of the products tested were found to be on the '"low hazard" category.

The co-author of the study, Nneka Leiba, said that as a black woman, she felt bad that black women like herself have lesser options for safer beauty products that are targeted to them. The ingredients of these beauty products that contain hazardous chemicals are claimed to contribute risks of cancer, damage to the reproductive system, and allergies, mostly on the skin, CNN reports.

The news site reports that the significance of the study on these beauty and skin care products is to give everyone access to information on how safe a certain product is, so they will know if it is safe for them to use or not. E-mails asking for products marketed to black women were the ones who urged the EWG to come up with the recent investigation.

Buzzfeed also reports that other chemicals found in beauty products for black women were claimed to contribute to breast cancer's high incident rate. The report also stated that the study helps people understand the risks and benefits of certain products that are marketed to them.