A friend asked me to decorate her skin with henna when I was teaching at Kent State University in 1992. It was part of her culture and she loved to have henna for celebrations. I had heard of henna but didn’t know much about it, so I began researching. My curiosity quickly outran the university’s library; I found little published on the subject of henna in the English language. When I asked people from countries where henna had been in cultural use in centuries past, I got some reminiscences, but little substantive information. I also asked hairdressers about henna; they all insisted it was dangerous and ruined one’s hair.
The more I researched, the more I found stylists’ disdain for henna perplexing, and the more I felt challenged by the lack of research on henna published in English. I gradually assembled five file cabinets of scarce and scattered information and began to form some ideas about the science, botany, and history of henna that other people had not, possibly because they were always focusing on something else. There were scraps of information on henna in anthropology, botany and chemistry, but these scraps were always incidental to some other focus, such as kinship patterns, semi-arid zone habitats, and quinones. Though people often claimed “the history of henna is lost in the mists of time” or that it was somehow secret, I thought I saw connections and a continuous interrelationship of the science and cultures of henna.
Read more: https://www.mehandi.com/v/vspfiles/downloadables/chapt1_ppd-sensitization-epidemic.pdf
Links to specific topics in this chapter:
Ancient Sunrise® Henna for Hair: Foreword
Henna is NOT black
Mapping the use of ‘black henna’ temporary tattoos
The epidemic of PPD sensitization and the urgency of using pure hennaStylists and PPD Sensitization
Stylists and PPD Sensitization
Appendix I: Cross Sensitizations to Para-Phenylenediamine
Apppendix II: Incidents
