We all know the pain of a dodgy cut and blow-dry, or the hairdresser who never shuts up (or who never says a word, if that’s your thing). Less known is beauty parlour syndrome – or vertebrobasilar insufficiency – the term for a stroke thought to be caused by getting your hair washed at a salon. Experts believe that the process of tilting the neck backwards over a basin can, on extremely rare occasions, tear the artery, leading to blood clots and strokes.
This is what happened to Dave Tyler, who collapsed in 2011 two days after getting his hair cut at a Brighton salon and has just won £90,000 in compensation. At London’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, he was reportedly asked by a consultant if he had had his hair cut recently. Beauty parlour syndrome was coined in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1993 by Dr Michael Weintraub after he saw five women who had developed serious neurological symptoms following shampoos at hair salons. Complaints included severe dizziness, loss of balance and facial numbness. Four out of five suffered strokes.
“I have never heard of it,” admits my Edinburgh hairdresser, Lesley Moses, who has been in the business for 25 years and has been washing and cutting my hair for nearly 10 of those. “I suppose it has to do with your basin: cheaper ones don’t give the right support. Mostly it’s about the consultation with the client. That’s the point where I assess what needs to happen at the basin and beyond.” Has he ever known anyone to get ill or injured after coming to see him? “No,” he says. “I have had the odd client who has made me aware of neck problems, but then we change the washing position.”
Hairdressing remains an unregulated industry and the UK is one of the only countries in the world that does not have a system of compulsory registration. Hairdressers do not need a formal qualification to shampoo hair. Put that together with sharp instruments, high heat and powerful chemicals and the salon starts to look less like an oasis of calm and more like a barbershop of horrors. Examples given by firms specialising in salon injury claims include chemical, electrical and heat burns, allergic reactions and anaphylactic shock, and poor application of chemicals. One spiel begins: “Did you know the peroxide used to bleach your hair in a high-street salon is the same chemical that was used to propel early rockets?”
On extremely rare occasions, effects can be fatal. In 2012, Julie McCabe died a year after she developed a severe allergic reaction to L’Oréal hair dye, fell into a coma and never regained consciousness. At the inquest, the coroner said he believed it was only the second death in the UK resulting from the use of hair dye. The Guardian’s beauty columnist Sali Hughes has also written about being admitted to hospital with a potentially fatal reaction after her hair was dyed at a salon.
“Clients can become allergic to products that they have not been allergic to before,” Moses explains. “All colour clients should have a regular skin or patch test every six months.”
Hair-raising tales: beauty parlour syndrome and the dangers of visiting the salon
