Woman, 26, suffers from organ failure due to HAIR CREAM, causing her kidney to shut down

A chemical used in hair straighteners sold online could cause kidney failure, doctors have warned – after a woman who regularly had her hair done suffered organ damage.

The unnamed woman also felt nauseous and experienced vomiting, diarrhea, fever and back pain soon after regularly using products containing glyoxylic acid.

She had no health problems before the treatments, but said she also felt a burning sensation on her scalp when the chemicals were applied.

Doctors warned that glyoxylic acid and its derivatives – such as glycolic acid – popular in ‘Brazilian’ and ‘formaldehyde-free’ hair treatments, could seep through the skin into the blood and travel to internal organs.

Once there, they can form crystals – the doctors suggested – which can prevent the kidneys from functioning properly.

In the event, revealed in the New England Journal of Medicinethe woman went to the same salon three times in June 2020, April 2021 and July 2022 for treatments.

The same day after each treatment, she was diagnosed with acute kidney injury, which is a sudden loss of function of the kidneys – when they stop filtering water and waste products from the blood.

Hospital tests showed that levels of creatinine – a waste product – in her blood had risen to double their normal levels.

It was not clear how she was treated, but this may have included intravenous fluids and dialysis – or being connected to a machine to filter the blood.

The woman, from Tunisia, had used a cream containing ten percent glyoxylic acid.

Doctors suggested that glyoxylic acid damaged the kidneys because it broke down in the organs into ‘elongated’ crystals that formed stones and prevented the organs from functioning properly.

Glyoxylic acid works by temporarily changing the structure of the hair, allowing hairdressers to turn frizzy hair into straight.

The revelation comes amid three lawsuits against L’Oréal over its hair straightening cream, which women claim has given them cancer.

They included Jennifer Mitchell, 32, of Missouri, who said she has been using chemicals to straighten her hair since she was in the third grade in 2000.

But in 2018, the woman said she was diagnosed with uterine cancer and had to undergo a hysterectomy, depriving her of the chance to have children.

About 60 percent of women in the US who use hair straighteners are black and rely on the products to defuse their naturally frizzy hair.

For the study, doctors also conducted an experiment with ten mice to investigate the risks of glyoxylic acid.

The mice were divided into two groups, with half spreading the acid on their backs while the rest received the placebo Vaseline.

Tests showed that the mice treated with the chemical had the ‘elongated’ crystals in their urine, unlike the mice that were not given them.

They said the crystals resembled those of people who had ingested the toxic alcohol ethylene glycol, which is found in many industrial products such as antifreeze.

These mice also had ‘significantly’ higher levels of the waste product creatinine in their blood 28 hours after the cream was rubbed on their backs.

The FDA has not banned the chemicals, but says previous studies have linked them to increased sensitivity to sunlight.

They do not mention whether the chemicals included in the cosmetics can cause kidney damage.

The French study comes after a separate paper published last year found that 26 Israeli women suffered kidney failure after using chemical hair straighteners.

The patients, who had been registered since 2019, had been hospitalized due to their condition and also suffered from headaches, vomiting and shortness of breath.

They included a 13-year-old girl, a woman who was 15 weeks pregnant and a 42-year-old woman.

Dr. Meital Keidar, a nephrologist who led the study, said: ‘The women I have treated all say that they would not wish this trauma on anyone.

‘Women should not have to pay such a price for cosmetic treatment.’