In 2019, California became the first state in the country to pass the CROWN Act -- Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair -- a law that explicitly prohibits discrimination based on hair texture and protective hairstyles including braids, locs, twists, and knots. The law filled a gap that had existed in civil rights protections for decades: the disparate enforcement of 'professional appearance' standards against Black employees and students whose natural hair did not conform to Eurocentric aesthetics.
The need for such a law was documented and well-established long before 2019. Black women and girls had been sent home from jobs and schools, barred from sports competitions, and penalized in professional evaluations -- not for anything their hair did, but simply for how it grew. These were not isolated incidents. They were patterns, and they were legal, because anti-discrimination law did not explicitly cover hair.
By 2024, more than 20 states had passed versions of the CROWN Act. The federal version passed the House of Representatives in 2022 but had not been enacted into law at the Senate level. The patchwork of state protections meant that the same hairstyle could be protected in California and unprotected in another state -- a situation that advocates have continued to push to resolve at the federal level.
“Your hair is not a distraction. It is not unprofessional. It is just hair. And it should never cost you anything.”
For the beauty industry, the CROWN Act's passage marked a cultural inflection point that was already commercially underway. The natural hair movement had been building for more than a decade -- a groundswell of Black women rejecting chemical relaxers, embracing their natural textures, and creating demand for products that actually served those textures. The CROWN Act gave that cultural movement a legal frame.
The brands that had been building for this moment -- PATTERN Beauty, Mielle Organics, Camille Rose, The Mane Choice, and dozens of others -- were not waiting for the law to pass. They had read the community clearly and were already there. The CROWN Act made official what Black women had been declaring for years: natural hair is not a political statement. It is just hair.
