Before you started looking into the harms of beauty products, you were studying breast cancer as an environmental justice issue?

 Before you started looking into the harms of beauty products, you were studying breast cancer as an environmental justice issue?

Yes. It was based on Richmond, California, where Chevron is. We were looking at all of these chemicals—a lot of which were hypothesized to come from oil combustion—thinking about Chevron and the polluting industries. At that time I was a post-doc, so I just finished my PhD and the people I worked with also studied these endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the ones that come from products in your homes and building materials. I had a big finding that came out about flame retardants, which are in your couches, in your electronics.

“Statistically, the ratio of ethnic differences and douching explain the differences in phthalate levels.” 

I started working on that and then getting involved in the policy. When I started learning more about these chemicals, I started thinking about the beauty aspect of it. I wrote the first version of a beauty piece, and it was published in 2009 in a newsletter. The first real paper I published was in 2015 with a student; there, we focused on feminine hygiene products. People had already kind of shown that Black women had higher levels of certain beauty product-related chemicals like phthalates and parabens in their bodies compared to white women. We decided to try to figure out if we could and uncover what might be driving that.