The Shelf Audit Files No. 29 — The Lab Test

Consumer Reports sent thirty braiding hair products to an independent lab this year, and twenty-nine of them came back carrying lead. That is thirty dollars' worth of hair, braided against the scalp for weeks, and only one of the thirty came back with no lead, no arsenic and no cadmium in a single sample.

What nobody was checking is the paperwork — here, a lab table. There is no federal limit on lead in braiding hair, so nobody is required to test it and nobody is required to list what is in the bag. Consumer Reports did the testing itself, twice, and this book reads its published table row by row: which brands the test flagged, the one that came back with nothing detected, and what every pick costs.

A word on what this is. Every finding in here belongs to Consumer Reports, not to this book, and is printed as its finding with its name in the same sentence. This is not a medical opinion about your hair, your scalp or your health, and it does not offer one. It is a receipts check: what did the pack promise, and what did a laboratory actually measure. It is a buying guide on the lab result, and a companion to the earlier book on who owns these brands — a different question, checked the same way.