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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.

“Can I touch it?”

“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 sign that I probably shouldn’t be using it. (It turns out that “creamy crack” is linked to uterine cancer, according to a 2022 study.)

In 1996, I chopped my hair off and went natural. It wasn’t really a political statement. I also wasn’t concerned about cancer at the time. My decision was rooted in sheer frustration: I was living in Washington, D.C., I had started my first corporate job as a paralegal, and as any Black woman will tell you, relaxers and humid air do not mix.

At the time, my options for hair styles were extremely limited.

There was a quiet understanding among Black women professionals: If you wanted to be taken seriously, you relaxed your hair, wore wigs, or kept it cropped into the only natural style widely tolerated in professional environments—the teeny-weeny ’fro. (That’s what I opted for.)

It wasn’t paranoia that drove us to relaxers and wigs and away from natural hair styles. 

It was societal expectations. In 2007, for example, a Glamour magazine editor told lawyers at a Manhattan law firm during a presentation to “just say no to the ’fro,” and said dreadlocks are “truly dreadful.” 

Her remarks set off a firestorm.

In response to decades of discrimination like this, state lawmakers began passing bills that prohibit discrimination based on hair texture and protective styles like braids, locs, and twists. In 2019, California became the first state to pass a Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act, or CROWN Act, and since then, more than two dozen states have adopted similar laws.

But passing a law doesn’t magically end the policing of Black hair.

Just ask Darryl George, a Texas high school student who spent months in in-school suspension because his locs violated his school district’s grooming policy—even after Texas enacted its own CROWN Act in 2023. Courts ultimately allowed the school district to enforce its rule limiting the length of boys’ hair.

This systemic disdain for Black hair also explains why so many Black women wear braids.

If natural hair can still be treated as unprofessional—or simply “too much”—braids and extensions become the workaround. They allow natural hair to rest while producing a look white people are more comfortable with.

Which brings us back to the braiding hair, that the FDA has thus far shown no interest in regulating.

In 2025, Consumer Reports tested synthetic braiding hair and found potentially harmful chemicals. After many people began turning to supposedly safer alternatives, like human and plant-based hair made from banana fibers. Consumer Reports followed up in 2026 by testing those products as well—analyzing 30 braiding hair products from 29 brands, including human hair and plant-based options.

Lead was detected in 29 of the 30 products tested, and every product contained volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which can irritate the eyes, nose, and throat. 

Those findings quickly spread across TikTok and other social media sites—and so did skepticism about how dangerous these products actually are.

In a YouTube video responding to the magazine’s 2025 report on synthetic hair, Dr. Michelle Wong, an Australian scientist with a doctorate in chemistry, questioned how alarming the results actually are. Her critique wasn’t that the lead wasn’t present. It was that the levels Consumer Reports flagged as concerning were based on an ingestion model that doesn’t reflect how braiding hair is actually used.

For most adults wearing braids, Wong argued, the amount of hair someone would have to eat to reach concerning levels would be extremely high—like a yarn ball’s worth of hair every day.

Consumer Reports itself notes that ingestion is only one possible pathway for exposure. Braiding hair sits against the scalp and skin for weeks at a time, and stylists handle it constantly while installing it. Scientists say it’s difficult to determine how much contamination might be absorbed through skin contact or inhaled when hair is heated or manipulated.

So it’s unclear how harmful braiding hair is. 

Maybe the chemicals detected in braiding hair are harmless. Maybe they’re not.

But millions of Black women are wearing these products on our heads every day and the FDA is supposed to be the agency that answers questions like that.

And so far, it hasn’t.

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