Even around the sexual exploitation of enslaved women,

 Even around the sexual exploitation of enslaved women,

 scent was also used as a way to legitimize it. There’s all this history. And so there are also these adaptive responses. What’s critical to this conversation of thinking about chemical exposures and health impacts from environmental chemicals is that it has to be done through a structural racism lens because there are many social, cultural, historical factors that drive our beliefs about beauty. 

Earlier this year, you collaborated with one of the nation’s oldest environmental justice groups, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, on a study that examined the use of harmful skin lighteners and hair relaxers by people of color in New York City. How did that come about?

The scholarship really resonated with them. We collaborated on helping them collect and analyze data in the communities that they work with because there was no data specific to those communities. And they wanted locally relevant data.