"How about second-degree burn on my ears and neck from a botched attempt at straightening my hair? I went to a salon years ago and the stylist applied a straightening product usually used on African-American women. He felt that my hair was curly enough for the strongest solution. What he didn't factor in was that I have pasty, sensitive, virgin English skin. My ears and forehead literally bubbled in the salon and I had to be rushed to the burn unit, where I was given a special shampoo to stop the chemical reaction and had to spend two months healing under a series of hats and scarves!"
K.S., Nahant
First of all, says stylist Lisa Proulx of I Soci Salon (8 Newbury Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, 617.867.9484), the relaxant should never have touched K.S.’s skin in the first place. Instead, stylists should apply the solution in small sections, staying a quarter- to a half-inch from the scalp. (We don’t think we need to tell you that requesting a treatment as serious as this one in a sketchy salon is not a good idea.) Proulx recommends going in for a consultation before having the service performed, in order to have your hair assessed and to get any of your questions answered. Traditional relaxers, after all, are extremely harsh chemicals. “It just kind of eats at the outside of the hair, and it never fully reaches the inside of the hair,” Proulx explains. “What you’re left with is this dry hair that’s neither straight nor curly.” I Soci offers a Japanese straightening system that, while still chemical, is geared towards Caucasian hair; it’s also much gentler than the traditional formula, employing the heat of a straightening iron to drive the chemical directly to the inner part of the hair shaft.
As for K.S. (who’s probably learned to love her curls by now), Proulx guesses that the relaxant’s chemicals did some major damage to her mane. “Hopefully, the burns will go away. But most likely she’s had not only the burns but her hair breaking, in which case you just need to grow it out and do treatments and that kind of thing until she gets her hair healthy again.” She recommends that K.S. invest in conditioning treatments — at a new salon, of course — around once every six weeks until her locks are healthy.