The Shelf Audit Files No. 15 — What The Label Says

A lot of us booked a keratin or Brazilian blowout treatment for one reason: to get away from a relaxer. The bottle backed that up. It said formaldehyde free, right on the front. So why did the company behind the best known version of this treatment get a federal warning letter for the exact opposite claim?

What nobody was checking is the paperwork. Five of the seven treatments in this book have a documented formaldehyde finding attached to them — an FDA warning letter, an OSHA citation, or a named laboratory's test result. Two do not carry a citation under their own name, and this book checks those two just as hard.

A word about what this is. Every finding in here belongs to somebody else — the FDA, OSHA, a state health and science agency, a named testing laboratory, a peer-reviewed journal — and is printed as that source's finding, with the source named in the same sentence. This book 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 bottle promise, and what did somebody with a laboratory actually find.