$30 Million Settlement for Salon Workers Who Developed Cancer After Years of Formaldehyde Exposure
Won by Humphrey, Farrington & McClain.
Two Missouri salon workers who spent over a decade using a professional hair-smoothing product the manufacturer marketed as formaldehyde-free settled their product liability claims for $30 million after one developed reproductive cancers and the other gave birth to a child who later developed leukemia.
What happened
For more than ten years, two Missouri hairstylists applied the same professional hair-smoothing product to clients day after day. The manufacturer sold it with a central promise: no formaldehyde. That claim turned out to be false, and the health consequences were severe.
One of the workers was diagnosed with uterine and ovarian cancer. The other was pregnant during part of her exposure, and her child was later diagnosed with leukemia. Attorneys at Humphrey, Farrington and McClain took the cases and set out to prove that the company knew the chemical was present and concealed it from the people most at risk.
The manufacturer's defense rested on a technical distinction: the product, it argued, did not contain formaldehyde directly but instead contained a different compound that releases formaldehyde when heated. The problem with that argument was apparent from the product's own instructions. The treatment was designed to be applied with heat. Workers were, in practice, generating formaldehyde vapor every time they used it as directed.
The firm argued that marketing the product as formaldehyde-free while knowing heat application would generate the chemical amounted to a deliberate concealment. Lauren McClain, one of the lead attorneys, described the manufacturer's conduct as 'egregious and outrageous,' noting the company denied the chemical was even present while workers were being exposed on the job every day.
The case resolved individually rather than through a class action. Kenneth McClain, Timothy Kingsbury, and Andrew Smith also worked the case alongside Lauren McClain. The parties, product name, and company remain confidential under the settlement terms. The $30 million resolution was reported by Missouri Lawyers Media in July 2025.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Humphrey, Farrington & McClain
All Humphrey, Farrington & McClain proven verdicts →A Jackson County jury returned a $108.6 million verdict for the parents of a woman who died from sepsis after her husband's religious group prevented her from receiving medical care during a botched home birth.
Attorneys Kenneth McClain, Jonathan Soper, Chelsea Pierce, and J'Nan Kimak secured $35.72 million in confirmed ERISA arbitration awards for 177 current and former DST Systems employees whose 401(k) profit-sharing plan collapsed after fiduciaries concentrated more than 45 percent of plan assets in a single pharmaceutical stock that lost roughly 94 percent of its value.
A Boone County jury awarded $35.25 million to the family of Anita Gibbs, a Kansas City elementary school principal killed when a CenTra Trucking driver failed to slow for stopped traffic on Interstate 70 in 2006, after Ken McClain of Humphrey, Farrington and McClain used offensive collateral estoppel to limit the trial entirely to damages.
A Laclede County jury awarded Philip Berger, a Copeland Scroll Compressors worker, $5 million in compensatory and $23 million in punitive damages after he developed hypersensitivity pneumonitis from contaminated cooling fluid. The trial court later granted a new trial on damages, and the Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed that order in 2016, so the verdict did not stand.
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