Haircare

A scoping review searched six databases for evidence that hair discrimination legislation changed Black women’s mental health. It screened 310 articles, included 15, and found not one that directly measured the outcome the law was written to fix.

A survey cultured 937 Cleveland schoolchildren and found 122 positive for scalp fungus, all African American, three fifths of them with nothing visible. Using anti-dandruff shampoo was associated with a higher chance of testing positive.

The pores in a hair fiber are counted with gas sorption rigs and calorimeters, and bleaching adds more of them. What does not exist anywhere in the literature is the three-bucket porosity type, or the glass of water people are told to test it with.

There are exactly two published series of follicular unit extraction in patients of African descent. The same device developer is first author on both. The larger one also found that curl was not the main problem — skin thickness was — which is not what anybody has been saying.

Frontal fibrosing alopecia is described in Black patients as starting earlier, running more severely and being diagnosed later. Not one of those three statements has a number attached to it, and the most-cited paper on the subject has no retrievable sample size at all.

The reference dataset for how much force combing actually puts on a hair — the one that underpins breakage claims on the back of a bottle — was built from Asian and Caucasian hair only. So was much of the diagnostic norm a pathologist reads a scalp biopsy against.

The 1a-to-4c scale was devised by a celebrity stylist, is described in the literature as the gold standard, and has never had a reliability study run on it. The measured alternative has existed since 2007, covers 22 countries, and deliberately refuses to sort anybody by ancestry.

Search the world’s principal medical database for turban and scalp and you get turban tumor, a nineteenth-century eponym for a rare adnexal cancer. The entire located dermatology literature on turban wearing is a single patient. Meanwhile face masks generated in two years the occlusion research head coverings never got in decades.

Discoid lupus hits Black patients at 5.4 times the rate of white patients and leaves them with 67 percent higher damage scores at first presentation. There is a full diagnostic-delay literature for hidradenitis suppurativa. For the disease that scars Black women’s scalps, there is none.

A double-blind randomized trial compared ciclopirox shampoo once, twice and three times weekly. Almost all the gain was in the first wash. It has been sitting in the literature since 2004, and the clinicians who keep naming the wash-frequency problem do not cite it.