Feeling it's time to freshen up your hair colour? At The $2 Shop in Wellington, Shinuo hair dye promises to "Completely cover white hair and seeps (sic) your hair brighter". This Chinese-made hair colour claims its added vitamin C will also "repair harmed fiber and make your hair elastic". Imagine ...
Other than the vitamin C claim, this product's packaging gives few clues about what's actually inside. That's not illegal - New Zealand's regulations don't require hair-dye ingredients to be listed. We think they should be.
Out-of-date standards
In the last two years, health concerns have prompted European countries to ban over 100 hair-dye ingredients. A further 42 have been given provisional approval for use while their safety is investigated. Among the 42 are several common hair-dye ingredients fingered as "strong" skin sensitisers - substances that have the potential to cause severe allergic reactions.
Back home, the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA) sets controls on hair-dye ingredients under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. The current controls are based on European standards - but they haven't been updated since 2006 and ERMA has recently announced plans to bring them into line with the EU's regulations.
ERMA is also proposing to introduce compulsory labelling of ingredients. These changes, however, aren't expected to be in place until later this year. In the meantime, substances banned in Europe back in 2006 can still be sold in hair-dye products here.
Not good enough
This isn't good enough. With long lists of chemicals that have almost unpronounceable names, deciphering the ingredients in hair dyes is no easy task. So it's vital that regulatory agencies do their job well. At the very least, this means keeping standards up to date.
It isn't a minor problem, either. While exact figures are hard to find, estimates suggest that more than 70 percent of women and 20 percent of men colour their hair. And we're starting younger and doing it more often. Supermarket hair-dye sales alone were worth over $20 million last year.
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