Hair Relaxer Lawsuit: MDL Bellwether Trials and Settlement Master

The hair relaxer lawsuit is a federal multidistrict litigation of more than 11,700 cases alleging that chemical hair relaxers and straighteners caused uterine, endometrial, and ovarian cancer in women who used the products regularly for years. The cases are consolidated as MDL No. 3060 before U.S. District Judge Mary M. Rowland in the Northern District of Illinois.¹ No settlements have been reached, no trials have taken place, and the first bellwether trial is scheduled for September 2027.²

Who Is Suing and What They Claim

The plaintiffs are overwhelmingly women who used chemical relaxers or straighteners for years or decades and later developed cancer or serious reproductive-tract conditions. They allege that manufacturers knew or should have known their products contained carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting chemicals — including formaldehyde, phthalates, parabens, and heavy metals — but failed to warn consumers, and that these chemicals can enter the body through scalp burns and lesions caused during the straightening process.³

The MDL currently accepts claims for four categories of injury:

Uterine cancer, including endometrial cancer. This is the core injury in the litigation and carries the strongest epidemiological support.
Ovarian cancer, supported by findings from the NIEHS Sister Study.⁴
Uterine fibroids that required a hysterectomy or myomectomy.⁵
Wrongful death claims brought by families of women who died from these cancers.

Breast cancer claims are not part of the bellwether pool, and several plaintiffs’ firms have concluded that the current scientific evidence is not strong enough to pursue them.⁶ If you used relaxers heavily and were later diagnosed with breast cancer alone, that condition is not currently a viable claim in the federal MDL.

Judge Rowland has already ruled on early motions to dismiss. She threw out four fraud-based claims but allowed the core theories to move forward: negligence, strict liability for design defect and failure to warn, breach of warranty, unjust enrichment, and wrongful death. She wrote that the allegations “read as a whole give rise to the inference that defendants’ conduct proximately caused plaintiffs’ injuries.”¹

The Products and Companies Named

The defendants span much of the hair care industry. The most prominent are L’Oréal (owner of SoftSheen-Carson and Dark & Lovely), Godrej SON Holdings and its subsidiary Strength of Nature, Dabur International and its subsidiary Namaste Laboratories (ORS Olive Oil), and Sally Beauty Supply.⁷ Others include Avlon, John Paul Mitchell Systems, Wella Operations US, Luster Products, and McBride Research Laboratories.

Product lines named in the litigation include Dark & Lovely, African Pride, Just for Me, ORS Olive Oil, Crème of Nature, Motions, Mizani, Soft & Beautiful, TCB Naturals, and Revlon Realistic.⁷ Complaints against Namaste specifically allege that ORS Olive Oil products were marketed as “all natural” and “safe” despite containing phthalates and other chemicals the plaintiffs link to cancer.⁸

Some defendants have already been removed. Judge Rowland dismissed L’Oréal S.A., the French parent, for lack of personal jurisdiction, and dismissed Walgreens for lacking a meaningful connection to the alleged injuries.³ In February 2025, the court denied motions to dismiss filed by John Paul Mitchell Systems, Wella Operations US, and Advanced Beauty, keeping those companies in the case.⁷

Revlon is a separate matter. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022, before the MDL took shape, so it is not a named defendant. Compensation for Revlon-related claims runs through its bankruptcy case instead, described below.

The Science the Cases Rest On

Two studies drive the litigation. A 2022 paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, based on the NIH Sister Study of nearly 34,000 women followed for about eleven years, found that women who used chemical straighteners more than four times a year had more than double the risk of uterine cancer compared to non-users.⁹ The estimated lifetime uterine cancer risk by age 70 rose from about 1.6% for non-users to roughly 4% for frequent users.¹⁰ The study found no similar link with hair dyes or permanents.

The Black Women’s Health Study followed almost 45,000 Black women from 1997 to 2019 and reported that postmenopausal women who used chemical relaxers for twenty years or more had roughly 71% higher odds of uterine cancer.⁴ Because chemical relaxers have been marketed heavily to Black women for generations, the real-world health burden falls disproportionately on Black communities, and plaintiffs’ theories include allegations that companies targeted marketing at Black consumers while concealing the risks.¹¹

Where the Case Stands in 2026

As of June 1, 2026, there were 11,723 active cases in the federal MDL, up from about 9,800 in January 2025 and 10,500 in October 2025.¹²⁷ The docket added about 197 new cases in a single month between May and June 2026, making this one of the largest active product liability proceedings in the federal system.¹³

Bellwether Trials

Bellwether trials are test cases used to show how juries respond to the evidence, and they typically shape settlement talks in every large MDL. The court initially selected 32 cases for a discovery pool and completed fact discovery for that group in March 2026.⁵

In April 2026, Judge Rowland narrowed the field to 10 workup cases and chose all ten herself, taking seven from the plaintiffs’ proposed pool and three from the defendants’.² To keep the test cases representative, she excluded plaintiffs with other cancer diagnoses, plaintiffs also suing over talc, plaintiffs with memory loss or mental health conditions, and cases with fewer than three named defendants.¹⁴ The bellwether pool focuses on uterine, endometrial, and ovarian cancer claims.⁶

Case-specific bellwether discovery closes June 10, 2026. Daubert and summary judgment motions are due November 16, 2026. The first bellwether trial is scheduled for September 2027.²

The Daubert Hurdle

The Daubert motions are the most consequential ruling still ahead. These are formal challenges to whether each side’s expert scientific testimony is reliable enough for a jury to hear. Under the court’s schedule, defendants may file up to 100 pages challenging the plaintiffs’ ten experts, and plaintiffs can respond with a single 100-page brief or with ten separate ten-page responses.⁶ If the court finds the evidence linking relaxers to cancer reliable, the litigation advances toward trial. If key experts are excluded, large portions of the case could collapse.

A Settlement Master Is in Place

The court appointed Ellen K. Reisman as special master in April 2025 to coordinate settlement negotiations. Reisman can order face-to-face negotiations, develop procedures, and make recommendations to the court, but she cannot advocate for either side.¹⁵ Her appointment is a standard step in large-scale litigation and does not signal that a deal is close.

Settlements: Nothing Yet, Estimates Circulating

No global settlement has been announced, no individual settlements have been reached, and all defendants continue to deny wrongdoing.¹⁶ Serious negotiations are widely expected to begin only after the first bellwether verdicts give both sides real data on how juries view the evidence.

Some analysts have projected settlement ranges of $150,000 to $750,000 per cancer claim, but these are estimates, not negotiated figures.⁵ No tier structure has been established for fibroid-only claims. Actual amounts, when they come, will depend on the strength of each individual case: cancer type and stage, the length and frequency of relaxer use, which products a plaintiff used, and the quality of medical and product-purchase evidence.

The Revlon Carve-Out

Because Revlon went bankrupt in 2022, claims against it run through the Chapter 11 case in the Southern District of New York, not the MDL. Revlon’s approved reorganization plan includes up to $44 million set aside for hair relaxer claimants.¹⁷ The bankruptcy court set a claims deadline of April 11, 2023, and about 30,000 claims were filed by that date.¹⁸ Claimants who missed that deadline are barred from any distribution from the Revlon estate.

State-Court Alternatives

The federal MDL is not the only venue. The Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas established a separate mass tort program in mid-2025 under Judge Joshua Roberts, and discovery is active there, including ordered depositions of corporate representatives from Wella and L’Oréal.¹⁹ Illinois state cohort trials may begin in late 2026 or early 2027, and New York state discovery is underway.⁶ In Georgia, the state Supreme Court ruled for plaintiffs on a statute-of-repose challenge, removing a barrier that could have blocked long-exposure claims. A state-court verdict could come before the federal bellwethers.

MDL, Not Class Action: Why That Matters to You

A common misconception is that this is a class action. It is not. In a class action, one representative group litigates for everyone and a settlement is usually divided on a formula. In an MDL, each plaintiff keeps a separate lawsuit. The cases are consolidated only for pretrial efficiency (discovery, expert challenges, common motions), and each person’s compensation is based on their own diagnosis, use history, products, and evidence.⁷

The upside is that a strong individual case — for instance, a woman with a uterine cancer diagnosis after decades of documented relaxer use — can potentially recover far more than a per-capita share of a class fund. The downside is time. With nearly 12,000 individual cases, no bellwether verdicts yet, and Daubert motions still pending, the litigation is closer to producing real outcomes than it has ever been, but the first trial is still more than a year away.

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Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Use of Straighteners and Other Hair Products and Incident Uterine Cancer
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NIH Intramural Research Program. Frequent Use of Chemical Hair Straighteners and Relaxers Is Associated With Increased Uterine Cancer Risk
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U.S. Bankruptcy Court, S.D.N.Y. In Re Revlon Inc., Case No. 22-10760
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Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. In Re: Hair Relaxer Products Liability Litigation