Dr. Alicia Franklin

My name is Dr. Alicia Franklin.

I am a chemist and an exposure scientist at Silent Spring Institute.

I study Black women's exposures to chemicals and the products that they use every day.

study participants swap out their couches because they wanted to reduce flame retardant chemicals in the indoor dust in the homes.

And I grew up on the South side of Chicago, frequent beauty supply stores.

And anytime I bought my braiding hair, it said flame resistant or flame retardant or something of that nature.

And it just dawned on me, like if they're trying to get rid of flame retardants from couches,

Why can we so intimately use these products in our everyday lives and like to the point where we're using braids and they're touching our scalp, they're touching our skin.

And the study kind of grew from there.

It went from just trying to understand like flammability.

and returning chemicals to really want to do a full evaluation of the chemicals present in hair extensions just because that expanse of work and comprehensive understanding of that just at the time hadn't been done yet.

What kinds of products were you testing?

I tested human hair, synthetic hair, eyelashes.

Eyelashes?

Oh, my gosh.

Not my lashes.

Yes, the lashes.

And we evaluated 43%.

hair extension products that we purchased from local beauty supply stores and online for those that we couldn't purchase.

And we did find dozens of chemicals of health concern that were in the extensions.