Is Your Hair Worth the Risk?

When I stop to think about the women in my life, I realize most of them use hair dye. In fact, one out of three women over eighteen dye their hair but they should know a large study bolsters the link between permanent hair dye and breast cancer. The study also associates breast cancer risk and chemical relaxers which are hair straighteners. The link is especially high for black women who used hair dye. They had a forty-five percent higher risk while white women had a seven percent higher risk.

The study enrolled forty-six thousand women aged thirty-five to seventy-four who had sisters with breast cancer. Eight years later, nearly twenty-eight hundred women developed breast cancer. Fifty five percent of them used permanent hair dye.

Black women had the highest risk, but women who used straighteners or personally applied dyes or straighteners also had higher risks. Women who used straighteners in the twelve months before the study had a nearly twenty percent increase in cancer risk. It rose to thirty-one percent when they used straighteners at least every five to eight weeks regardless of race.

You could argue the results aren't surprising since hair dyes contain more than five thousand chemicals including known mutagens or have hormone disrupting properties.

Mutagens cause changes in cellular DNA which can increase cancer risk. One in eight American women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime, but that number could go down if a safer hair dye becomes available.