America's Beauty Show Challenges To...( CHICAGO March 27 -- America's Beauty...),Health

CHICAGO, March 27 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- America's Beauty Show, March 28-30 in Chicago, is dedicated to safe and healthy beauty salons. By doing so, the Show raises serious and decades overdue concerns on the dangers of conventional nationwide salons.

Salon products are generally dispensed from bulk containers without labeled ingredients. Of particular concern is the cumulative contamination of air, particularly in poorly ventilated salons, with volatile ingredients and fine particles, particularly from hair sprays. Known as aerosols, these can penetrate deeply into the lungs of clients, and even more so their stylists working a usual five-day week.

Products used in the great majority of nationwide salons contain a wide range of toxic ingredients, including carcinogens, hormonal ingredients, and allergens. Exposure to them poses hidden dangers to clients, and much more so their stylists.

Stylists, particularly in small hair and beauty salons, tend to drift in and out of their jobs. So formal long-term studies to investigate dangers to their health, known as epidemiological, are not feasible. Moreover, there is substantial and long standing evidence on a wide range of toxic effects in salon workers, particularly hairdressers and beauty stylists. These include nausea, sleep disorders, fatigue, and numbness and pain in the fingers. They also include allergic dermatitis, acute lung irritation, asthma, and chronic bronchitis.

An additional poorly recognized danger from salon and personal use relates to hair straighteners based on thioglycolic acid. Besides causing hair to become brittle and break, they can also irritate the scalp and cause pustular and allergic reactions.

Of particular concern are hair dyes. About 35 percent of women and 10 percent of men are regularly exposed to these dyes in salons or by personal use. Black and dark brown permanent and semi-p
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