🔅 Your Braids Are Plotting Against You
Plus, Africa’s Luxe Apartment Craze Hits the Stratosphere
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
Toxic Tresses: Why Your Braids Might Be Plotting Against You
For years, Black women swapped chemical relaxers for braids, thinking, quite reasonably, that skipping lye baths would also skip the health hazards. Problem is, the synthetic hair industry apparently replied, “Hold my benzene.”
Consumer Reports just tested seven big-name braiding brands (Magic Fingers, Sensationnel, Shake-N-Go, etc.) and found every single sample loaded with volatile organic compounds, heavy metals, and even leukemia-linked benzene.
Exposure isn’t limited to salon day. Synthetic strands shed microscopic bits you can inhale or accidentally taste, especially once you seal braids with hot water or a lighter. One medical student in this article said her new “protective style” smelled like a fresh mattress and left her dry-throated and wheezing.
Researchers warn that dipping, singeing, and daily wear can all turn braids into slow-burn chemical diffusers, yet ingredients remain a black box. Meanwhile, 80% of beauty products aimed at Black women contain at least one moderate hazard, often hidden behind “undisclosed” catch-alls.
The takeaway: until regulators force transparency (or someone invents truly toxin-free extensions) double-check the labels, ventilate during install, and maybe retire the cigarette lighter. Because a hairstyle meant to protect your edges shouldn’t put the rest of your body on the edge, too.
Sky-High Dreams: Africa’s Luxe Apartment Craze Hits the Stratosphere
Across West Africa’s coastline, cranes are the new national bird. Lagos alone has roughly 600 condos in the $1 m-plus club rising skyward, even though average GDP per head is stuck at $800. Real estate now nips at oil’s heels, pumping nearly the same slice into Nigeria’s GDP.
Ghana’s Accra greets arrivals with duty-free perfume on the left and glossy brochures for off-plan penthouses on the right. Abidjan? Land prices climbing 10% a year for a decade. Your landlord’s grin says it all.
Why the gold rush? A richer, larger diaspora now prefers “home sweet home” to offshore Swiss accounts, partly because regulators finally started asking awkward questions. Dollar-denominated deeds in Dakar and Ivory Coast look a lot safer than money wired to never-never land.
Rents are pegged to the greenback, hotel suites are scarce, and build-to-rent developers happily play matchmaker between absentee owners and tenants who’ll foot the eye-watering bill. Mixed-use complexes (luxury flats stacked atop malls and sushi bars) offer middle-class window-shoppers a taste of glam, even if the buy-in remains fantasy-league.
Bubble worries? Sure, sceptics have forecast a crash every year since 2010. Yet high-net-worth wallets and a chronic shortage of other investment toys keep the party going.
Africa’s Mobile Boom: Now Connecting Calls and Skepticism
Africa’s once-disconnected villages now sit under a blanket of mobile coverage, and that steady buzz of phone calls is quietly eroding the deep well of trust rural voters used to place in presidents, police and anyone with an official stamp.
Every newly erected cell-tower lets relatives in rural areas speed-dial their cousins in Accra or Nairobi, and those cousins rarely sugar-coat the capital’s realities: soaring rent, underemployment, and politicians who swap campaign promises for radio silence.
In this study, political scientist Alex Yeandle maps sixteen years of Afrobarometer surveys against tower roll-outs and finds a clear pattern: when a signal arrives, average rural confidence in state institutions slides by roughly a tenth of a standard deviation… and keeps sinking for years.
A closer look at Ghana confirms the mechanism: once a household buys its first handset, calls to urban relatives jump by a quarter, chats about corruption and the economy multiply, and faith in government takes the hit.
It makes for a fascinating read, and if you’ve got the time, you can dive deeper right here.
Food for Thought
“A young monkey does not teach tricks to an old one.”
— Zanzibar Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is from Guelta d'Archei, Chad. Photo taken by elasturKon. You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.