A US woman has sued the French cosmetic giant, L’Oreal, for having giving her uterine cancer. The allegations comes a few days after a study stated that chemical hair-straightening tools can cause a rare type of cancer.
As per the reports, Jenny Mitchell, who has been using L’Oreal’s chemical hair straightening products for more than two decades, filed a civil lawsuit against the brand claiming it has caused her uterine cancer and forced her to undergo a full hysterectomy.
Hysterectomy is a surgery in which a a woman’s womb (uterus) is removed, leading to the fact that they can never get pregnant after the operation.
Mitchell’s attorney Ben Crump said that his client sought damages from the French company, among others. He also added that Black women were particularly made the target of such dangerous products.
“Black women have long been the victims of dangerous products specifically marketed to them,” said Crump.
“We will likely discover that Ms Mitchell’s tragic case is one of countless cases in which companies aggressively misled Black women to increase their profits,” he further stated.
Earlier, Black women across the US had also blamed Johnson & Johnson for selling talc-based powder that contained cancer-causing material like asbestos. The argument was that it was particularly marketed towards the dark-skinned demography of consumers.
According to a report in WION, a new study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, has shown that using chemical hair-straightening tools frequently puts women at a greater risk of a comparatively rare type of cancer.
The study was conducted on almost 34,000 women, between the age 35 to 74 years, of in the United States over a period of around 11 years.
The lead author of the study, Alexandra White of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Safety (NIEHS), said, “We estimated that 1.64 per cent of women who never used hair straighteners would go on to develop uterine cancer by the age of 70, but for frequent users, that risk goes up to 4.05 per cent.”
She further said that it is important to note that uterine cancer is a relatively rare type of cancer.
Although the study could not find any link of these diseases to a particular race, the researchers stress the importance the findings could have for black women who are the avid users of these products from a younger age- due to their curly hair origin.
Ms Kalinga