“The problem with these companies expanding or manufacturing their products in Africa means that they are able to evade a lot of the regulations that are available in, say, the US or in Europe,” Seyi Falodun-Liburd, Co-Director of Level Up tells NBC News. While Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) warned Nigerians against the use of hair-smoothing products containing formaldehyde in 2021, no further action has been made to ban or regulate its use as in the likes of Canada, Brazil, the EU and the UK. This relatively lax approach is prevalent continent-wide. Explaining why this is problematic, Falodun-Liburd again tells NBC News, “…consumers are most likely unaware of the effects of these hair relaxers. We don’t expect that [haircare companies] will expose us to harm for profit.” In a series of viral tweets from 2022, it was revealed that many of the models on numerous hair relaxer boxes actually had natural hair, adding more merit to the idea of distrusting hair relaxer manufacturers in the eyes of increasingly sceptical consumers.
