What you should know before you tint your hair
By Stephanie Kraft
Why do women—and men, too, in growing numbers—dye their hair? It’s not just because they “hate that gray,” though that’s part of the answer. A clue comes from the old expression “Titian hair,” which recalls the artist who loved to paint women with hair that glowed like copper in the light. The hue of our hair is part of our adventure with color. There’s a mystique about the various shades of henna, from bright copper to rose to dark bronze, a unique aura to pure platinum blonde, and a perverse allure to deep brunette tones (think Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago).
So how is a woman going to achieve these artistic, identity-enhancing, magical shades if she starts out with a color she dismisses as “mousey” or “dishwater?”
She’s going to go right down to her favorite hairdresser and start talking about tints, permanent or temporary. She’ll probably be told to take a patch test for allergies before using the product they mutually decide on. But if she’s like a lot of people, she won’t bother. These things wouldn’t be on the market if they weren’t safe, she’ll figure.
But there are dangers to using hair colorings—for women, for men, and, in a market that increasingly caters to all tones and textures, for people of all ethnicities. They range from the direct dangers of lymphomas, myelomas and bladder cancers to the lesser threats of allergies and, possibly, chemical sensitivity (the latter is believed to be set off in some people by a mischievous substance called p-phenylenediamine, which is being phased out of some hair colorings but is still found in others). Hair tints are only lightly regulated, when they’re regulated at all, by the federal Food and Drug Administration; in what’s essentially a self-policing process for the hair color industry, they’re given far less scrutiny than food or even medicine.
It’s easy to think of hair dye as something you apply externally, but it’s not that simple. Hair dye makes its way into the body through the scalp. When people do their own dyeing, it may come in contact with the skin in other ways. An older view of skin held that, absent cuts, it was an almost impervious protective covering, but now it’s known that the skin is an organ that interacts with what it contacts. Substances that are worked into it, or allowed to soak in on a regular basis, penetrate and may be absorbed into the bloodstream and internal organs. Remember, some hair tints contain substances added on purpose to give them penetrating power—to help the customer get the richer, more durable color she (or he) wants.
Let’s agree that no woman is going to pour Clairol into her tea; nevertheless, to get an idea of how hostile to one’s system hair dye can be, it’s worthwhile to look at what the National Institutes of Health says could happen to someone who swallows “various hair dyes” that may contain phenylene diamines, toluene diamines, mercury, lead, arsenic, ammonia and other bad actors. Swallowing permanent or temporary tints can leave a person unable to breathe, walk or urinate normally, or speak without slurring. It can cause burning pain in the throat, blurred vision or outright collapse, and damage the stomach and esophagus.
Hair dye, in short, is not benign stuff. It’s toxic, though the degrees of toxicity vary. Before we talk about you and your hair, let’s take one more detour, this time into the subject of what hair tints do to the people who spend the most time with them: hairdressers.
One study of occupational hazards to beauticians in 10 countries found that in seven of the countries studied, hairdressers were 40 percent more likely than other people to get bladder cancer.
As we move on to the results of dyeing on the client, one point is worth making: you’re a person, not a statistic, and you deserve an answer to your questions about safety that isn’t patronizing. An important study published in 1994 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute got a headline that must have delighted the hair tinting industry: “Hair Dye and Cancer: Reassuring Evidence of No Association.” The title was backed up by a statement that “use of permanent hair dyes is unlikely to contribute substantially to the rising incidence of and mortality from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the United States.”
But what came before that in the text was a finding that women who used black hair dye for 20 years or more were more likely than the general population to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma or multiple myeloma.
So maybe not enough women use a permanent black dye for 20 years to create a big bubble in the statistics; so what? You don’t want to contract either of those conditions, even if it only puts you in a tiny, elite peer group. Read carefully between the lines of studies by stat-crunching health researchers; information that could save your life can be hidden in a dismissively written clause.
Two years before the “No Association” article—in 1992—researchers at the National Cancer Institute found that 20 percent of all cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma may be linked to the use of hair colorings. The question of toxicity in hair dye is not easy to get clear answers to at any given time, however, because periodic campaigns by consumer groups cause cosmetic companies concerned about their reputations to modify the composition of their products, at least in some cases.
A more recent study that everyone needs to know about was done in 2001 by researchers at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, led by Dr. Manuela Gago-Dominguez. What’s important about this study is that it emphasized the intimacy of the reaction between hair coloring and each woman’s genetic makeup. The researchers found that women with so-called NAT1-slow, NAT2-slow and CYP1A2-slow genes—genes that don’t allow their systems to flush out carcinogens as fast as genes found in other women do—were two to six times as likely to get bladder cancer after using permanent hair dyes as women with the “fast” genes.
This finding applied to women who used self-administered permanent hair dye once a month or more for a year or longer, and, unlike the results of some studies of the effects of hair tinting, was corrected for smoking. “We estimate that 19% of bladder cancers in women in Los Angeles County, California, may be attributed to permanent hair dye use,” the researchers wrote.
So far, no study has proven conclusively that it is or is not safe to dye your hair. It’s a matter of relative risk, a decision only you can make by balancing the reason you want to tint your hair (self-image enhancement, social acceptability, personal aesthetic), and the way you plan to do it (what shade, what product, how often, how long), with your concerns about your health. Some expert can always be found who will make the condescending observation, as two did in a recent New York Times article, that tinting your hair is safer than smoking or driving drunk.
A statement that’s not condescending comes from Dr. Andrew Weil, founder and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine (PIM) at the College of Medicine, University of Arizona. Weil avoids sensationalizing the risks of tinting, but in answer to a question from a reader offered this caution online: “In general, I discourage people from using hair dyes containing artificial coloring agents, which to my mind are as suspect in cosmetic products as they are in food. When you apply hair dyes to your head, they’re absorbed through the scalp, where there’s a very rich blood supply that may carry them throughout the body.”
Above all, if you decide to dye, be skeptical. Beware of the backlash of reassuring stories you always read in the press immediately after the publication of any new evidence that tinting isn’t safe; remember that this is an industry whose leaders once pulled their advertising from Ms. magazine after Ms. ran a short article carrying already-publicized information about congressional hearings on the safety of hair dye, as Gloria Steinem famously recounted in “Sex, Lies and Advertising.”
Read the label on your product and check for information about its components on the website for the National Institutes of Health or another non-industry-related source. Check out European Union standards, which are in some cases more protective of consumers than American standards (last summer the EU banned 22 chemicals from hair dye as part of a program to make sure the only ingredients used in the $3 billion-a-year European hair coloring industry are safe). Think twice before deciding to apply permanent color yourself; that will save you money, but it will increase your exposure to the harsh chemicals in the dye . Best of all, investigate the growing number of natural products that can give you the tint you want with lower concentrations of toxic substances.?
Dan Cooper and Rachel Parzivand contributed research for this story.
