Creamy crack, perms, relaxers — known by many polyonyms, chemical hair straighteners have been a fixture in the Black beauty space since their inception in 1909. But now, with the FDA proposing a ban on hair straighteners with formaldehyde, commonly found in relaxers, our relationship with the beauty treatment is once again being called into question. It is no secret that Black people have faced unmitigated discrimination regarding the appearance and texture of their hair. At their core, relaxers served as a means of assimilation, allowing us to mirror straighter hair textures at the cost of our natural hair pattern and, as we’d come to find out later, our health. Present-day relaxers have largely fallen out of favor due to links to endocrine cancers, the digitized natural hair movement of the 2010s, and the introduction of laws like the Crown Act, which make discriminating based on hair texture illegal. Recently, though, there has been a slight resurgence of relaxers on social...