When seven-year-old Leah came home from school and showed her mom the beautiful henna tattoos on her hands, her mother, Tammy Samour, was dumbfounded.
“I saw her hands were decorated and asked her what is this and she said it’s henna. I didn’t know what that was,” mom said.
Leah’s hands were covered with an intricate brown design, known as a henna tattoo. The second-grader got the tattoos during a lesson on different cultures at Ed White Elementary School in Houston, Texas.
Samour told Click2Houston, “Learning about culture is awesome, but I don’t want it tattooed on my daughter, it is not our culture.” She acknowledges that the school did send an email as part of the upcoming lesson plan, saying the activity would explore cultures from Spain, the United States, Australia, Israel, and India. In parentheses was the mention of henna tattoos.
“I didn’t see the email, my husband did, but we didn’t know what henna was,” Samour said. Of course, they didn’t bother to Google “henna,” because if they had taken the time to do so, they would have broadened their cultural understandings and their knowledge of what the FDA has to say about henna.
Mom and the teacher spent several days scrubbing Leah’s hands with “every cleaning product known to man,” says mom. “Especially that Christmas is next week. We have family photos, opening presents, church, and she is going to be wearing that on her hands throughout the holiday,” Samour said.
As for the school’s response, Elaina Polsen, Clear Creek Independent School District director of communications says, “We certainly will do a better job in the future to make sure that parents are informed of what this is and how long it will take, and again we regret that this family is upset about it.”
Interestingly, if the family had read up on henna, they would have found that in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration issued Import Alert 53-19 on September 23, 2015, over regulations governing the sale and safe use of henna.
Specifically, henna imported into the U.S. that appears to be used for body art is subject to seizure. The color additive regulation 21 CFR 73.2190 specifically allows for the safe use of henna in coloring the hair only. The regulation does not allow for the safe use of henna to make colored designs directly on the skin, including the hands and feet. The alert also lists numerous foreign importers that come under the directive and the September alert.
