Woman suffers 3rd-degree burn after salon treatment

HOUSTON – A Harris County woman is suing a local hair salon and the maker of a hair product after she said a color service left her with a third-degree chemical burn stretching across the top of her head. 

Idania Rivera said it happened March 19 at Unique Boutique and Hair in the 14700 block of Woodforest Boulevard. 

Rivera, who said she had been to the salon, once before for a haircut with a different stylist, wanted to lighten the color of her naturally dark hair. 

The lawsuit alleges the stylist used a product called Pravana Pure Light Power Lightener. 

Halfway through the process, Rivera left the salon with the product still in her hair to pick up her daughter from home. 

"I felt my head burning," Rivera said in Spanish through an interpreter. 

Rivera returned to the salon where the stylist washed out the product. He offered her two ibuprofen, but Rivera says she was still in so much pain she ended up in the emergency room. 

"Nobody expects to go into a hair salon and come out of there scalped," said Rivera's attorney, Hilda Sibrian. 

The injury is so severe, Rivera's doctors said she will need a six-week hospital stay for a series of skin grafts and hair transplants. 

"There should be no consumer product that can caught this type of damage by itself," said attorney Mo Aziz, who also represents Rivera. 

The attorneys claim the product is dangerous and defective and say the salon owner and the stylist were negligent.

The stylist is not currently named in the lawsuit, but Aziz says that could change later. 

KPRC asked the stylist for a comment on the allegations, but he said he couldn't talk about it. When asked if he might have accidentally left the product on too long, he said, "No". 

The salon owner, Catherine Martinez, who is named in the lawsuit, said she had not yet been served and had no comment. 

A spokesperson for Henkel, the parent company of product maker Pravana, also had no comment.