Our Story

It started with a feeling in my stomach.

My daughter had just started school. She is three years old. Her hair is 3C — dense, spiralled, extraordinary. And the moment I walked her into that classroom for the first time, surrounded by her Swiss classmates with their straight hair, I felt something I had not felt in years.

Dread.

Not for her. Not yet. She did not know yet. But I knew. I had lived it. And I knew that she would too.

I grew up moving between countries and cultures. One of the places I lived longest was Brazil — where racism is not subtle. It is structural, it is daily, and it is written into the way people look at your hair before they look at your face. I learned early what it means to walk into a room and have your hair be the first thing people decide about you.

Later, I studied psychology in Portugal. University. An environment that is supposed to be open, critical, rigorous. And still — comments at hairdressers who did not know how to touch my hair and told me so. Looks in hallways. The low-grade, constant awareness of being the one whose hair does not belong.

And then there was the CV photo.

In Europe, job applications require a photograph. I have always found this absurd — and I have always known exactly what it is for. Studies confirm what Black women have always understood: employers make decisions about hair before they read a single line of your experience. A buzz cut on a Black man scores higher than locs. A straightened style reads as more professional than a natural one. The photograph is not neutral. It never was.

When my daughter started school, I made a decision.

I am a psychologist. I know what discrimination does to the body and the mind over time. I know what it does to a child who starts to understand that something about her — something she was born with, something that is part of her culture, her ancestry, her identity — is being read as a problem. I know what that costs.

And I knew that in Switzerland — in France — in Europe — nobody had counted it. No data. No research. No legislation. No framework for protection.

You cannot protect what has not been counted. You cannot change what has not been studied. You cannot legislate what does not yet have a name in this language, in this country, in this legal system.

So I built CROWN.

CROWN Association exists to do what no institution in French-speaking Europe has done yet: produce rigorous, independent research on hair discrimination — its prevalence, its mechanisms, its psychological cost — across professional and educational environments, across all genders, across Switzerland and France.

Because hair is not just hair.

It is identity. It is culture. It is memory. It is the thing your grandmother taught you to care for. It is the thing your daughter will learn to love or to hide — and that choice will be made, in part, by how the world receives her.

We are here to make sure the world has no excuse not to see it.