Behind the Beauty Counter

Read This First

Chemical in your eye (relaxer, straightener, lash glue, lash-lift lotion, hair dye, nail liquid): rinse with clean running water straight away and keep rinsing while someone gets you to urgent care or calls an ambulance. Don't wait to see if it settles.

Swelling of your face, lips, eyelids, tongue or throat, or any trouble breathing or swallowing after a dye, glue, cream or salon treatment: call emergency services (911 in the US, 999 in the UK, 999 or 112 in Kenya ). This can close your airway.

The full list is on the Go Now card at the back of this book. Tear it out, screenshot it, stick it inside the bathroom cabinet.

What this book is

You relax your hair, or you used to. You wear lashes. You get your nails done every three weeks and you have a little drawer of gel colours at home. You bought the palette from a market stall or a marketplace app because it was a third of the price. You have a tattoo, or brows that someone drew on with a blade and pigment. You've heard the rumours: relaxers and cancer, fake makeup with rat droppings in it, lash serums that change your eye colour. You haven't heard the evidence.

This book is the evidence, sorted. Keep what you love, and lower the risk.

It is written for the person who is going to keep using these products and services, because most of us are. It tells you what each one actually does to your scalp, skin, eyes, nails and teeth; what goes wrong often and what goes wrong rarely; which reactions are a nuisance and which need a doctor today; and the exact questions to ask at the salon counter, the market stall and the studio before anyone touches you.

It starts with a fact most people get wrong: in the US, most beauty products reach the shelf without any government agency approving them first. Everything after that makes more sense once you know it.

What it is not

• Not medical advice. It can't examine your scalp or your eye. It tells you what to watch for and when to get seen, and what to say when you are.
• Not a brand ranking. We name a company only where a regulator, a court or published testing has. Lawsuits are described as allegations unless a court has decided them.
• Not a "throw it all out" book. You won't find "love your natural hair" sermons here, or "chemical-free" scare lists. Many of the scariest-sounding claims online are wrong, and we say so. Some of the boring ones (skipping a patch test, a DIY gel kit, a foot spa after shaving your legs) are where people actually get hurt.
• Not a DIY manual. There are no recipes, no home-mixing instructions and no how-to for doing salon work on yourself.

Skin lightening creams and soaps have their own book in this series, The Price of Pale. Fillers, botulinum toxin and IV drips are in Needles in Your Face. Intimate "rejuvenation" and bleaching are in Down There, For Sale. Veneers and dental tourism are in Turkey Teeth Gone Wrong.

About the stories

Most chapters open with a real, documented case: a regulator's alert, a published medical case report, a court filing or a news report. We cite every one.

Some stories are composites; names and details are changed. Where a chapter opens with a composite, it says so. A composite never carries a precise statistic, a named real salon or clinic, or words put in the mouth of a real person.

How to read it

Read Chapter 1 first. It explains who checks (and who doesn't check) what's in your bathroom, and it changes how you read every label after it. Then jump to the chapters for the things you actually use. Chapters 11 and 12 pull everything together: one for parents and teens, one for the yearly bag audit.

• Any beauty product at all — Chapter 1: Less Regulated Than You Think
• Relaxers, texturisers, keratin or "Brazilian" smoothing, silk press — Chapter 2: Hair Relaxers and Straighteners
• Makeup, perfume or skincare from markets, social media sellers or marketplace apps — Chapter 3: Counterfeit Cosmetics
• Lash extensions, cluster lashes, lash lifts, lash tints, lash serums — Chapter 4: Lashes
• Acrylics, gels, builder gel, home gel kits, pedicures — Chapter 5: Nail Salons
• Tattoos, microblading, permanent eyeliner or lip blush, laser removal — Chapter 6: Tattoos, Microblading and Permanent Makeup
• Box or salon hair dye, beard dye, henna, holiday "black henna" — Chapter 7: Hair Dye and Black Henna
• Braids, locs, weaves, sew-ins, glued lace-front wigs — Chapter 8: Wigs, Weaves and Braids
• "Clean" products, essential oils, kitchen remedies, sunscreen questions — Chapter 9: "Clean Beauty", Fragrance and DIY Skincare
• Whitening strips, kits, pens, charcoal toothpaste, salon whitening — Chapter 10: Teeth Whitening Kits and Charcoal
• A child or teen who uses any of the above — Chapter 11: Kids, Teens and Beauty
• Everything, once a year — Chapter 12: Read the Label, Spot the Fake

Every chapter has the same boxes. Go Now lists the signs that mean emergency care. Ask This gives you the exact words to say, with what a good and a bad answer sound like. Myth / What the evidence says takes one thing you've heard and checks it. If You're Doing It Anyway is the lower-risk version. And every chapter names The One Thing: the single fact that, if you don't know it, is most likely to hurt you.

Do this now

Take a minute and write down every beauty product and service you've used in the last three months: the relaxer, the lash glue, the gel kit, the dye, the "authentic" palette from the app. Put a star next to anything you bought from someone other than the brand or a shop you'd trust to take it back. That list is your reading order, and in Chapter 12 it becomes your Beauty Bag Audit.

If something on that list has ever made your eyes sting, your scalp burn or your face swell, read its chapter first.

About this book

This book is educational. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for a clinician who knows your history. If you have warning signs now, use the Go Now card or call your local emergency number. For everything else, take the questions in this book to a doctor, nurse or pharmacist.

Less Regulated Than You Think

In 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did something unusual for a shampoo. It told the public it was investigating a hair product.

The product was a line of "cleansing conditioners", sold as a gentler, no-lather alternative to shampoo. From February 2011 to early July 2016, the FDA had received 127 reports of hair loss, balding, itching and other problems from people who had used it. That sounds like a small number until you hear the second one. When FDA inspectors visited the companies that made and marketed it, they learned of more than 21,000 similar complaints that had been made directly to the companies.

Twenty-one thousand complaints had come in. The agency responsible for cosmetic safety in the United States had received 127 reports, because at that time no law required a cosmetics company to pass consumer complaints to the FDA. A duty to report even serious reactions only arrived in 2022.