“I wanted to do it right,” said Natascha Bintz about doing her children’s hair. She wanted to understand their hair texture, find the right products, know how to braid and care for their curls. Bintz’s partner is French-Gabonese and Bintz didn’t know how to style the hair of mixed children, she said in an interview. But living in Luxembourg, she also didn’t know who to ask for help.
“My whole family is white, Luxembourgish. They are not used to this type of hair,” she said. Her parents, she said, didn’t even know how to take care of her own curls growing up. “I looked like a sheep.”
With the help of Instagram, her sister-in-law, and hairdressers in bigger cities, Bintz figured out a hair routine, not just for her children but also for her husband and herself.
“It inspired me a lot,” she said. She stopped straightening her own hair to empower her children to embrace their natural locks.
“You want your kids to be confident.” Not an easy feat, when few of their peers at school have the same type of hair and there is an “obsession”, especially among younger girl, to wear long straight styles.
“She’s the only one in the school with hair like this. When I do the braids, my daughter has told me that they pull them,” Bintz said.
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While her daughter takes this in her stride, the mother has a hard time looking the other way.
Family have called her children Struwwelpeter – a figure from a German book of folk tales. The Struwwelpeter won’t let anyone comb his hair or cut his nails and he becomes a social outcast with a wild mane of hair. “They don’t mean it badly, they never do. But I get really offended. I feel this is not helping.”
Her husband, she said, rarely wears his afro but styles and braids his hair for risk of people thinking he is unprofessional or, worse, lazy, dirty and not taking care of himself.
Anti-discrimination legislation
France’s lower house of parliament in March approved legislation that outlaws discrimination against dreadlocks, braids, afros and any other hairstyle, colour or texture. The Senate is yet to pass the law.
Olivier Serva, a member of parliament from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, had drafted the bill. She cited a 2023 study by LinkedIn and shampoo brand Dove that showed that two out of three Black women in the US wear their hair differently for job interviews. Black women’s hair is 2.5 times more likely to be regarded as unprofessional, the study also found.
There is no equivalent legislation in Luxembourg.
“I don’t really know what to think about it,” said Grace, a cross-border commuter who lives in Belgium, about the French legislation. “Whether you’re Black or white, there are some hairstyles that you should not have in a corporate environment.”
There should be no need for such a law, Grace said. People should simply apply common sense in the workplace, she said.
Other women - who did not wish to be cited for this article - indicated that they had never experienced any problems at school or at work, with some suggesting that natural hair is becoming more common as Luxembourg is increasingly diverse.
Younger generation
A selection of companies contacted for this article said they did not have any specific rules in their dress codes about different types of hair. IMS, a sustainability initiative in Luxembourg that also champions a diversity charter, said it had not heard about companies with policies that were either proactively inclusive or prohibitive.
“I’m at a really international company,” said Grace. “I don’t feel any pressure to wear my hair a certain way […] I have one older colleague who wanted to touch my hair, but I have colleagues who are my age and they are pretty knowledgeable.”
While there are no rules mandating Grace to wear her hair any particular way, she prefers keeping it in braids. “When you’re not Black, you maybe don’t see all the different types of hair that we have,” she said, adding that her hair is very coarse and requires a lot of care. Wearing it in braids, makes it more manageable, she said.
But she hesitated when asked if she would wear an afro at work. “I’m not ready for that,” she said. “I take public transport and when I was younger I wouldn’t have had the courage to wear my hair naturally. I can see that more teenagers are doing this in Luxembourg.”
‘It takes a lot of work’
Jackie – who came to Luxembourg from Kenya and works as a nanny – has also found that the younger generation is doing things differently.
“My daughter has really maintained her natural hair. She’s proud to have her natural hair,” she said. Washing, moisturising, putting it in buns before going to sleep… “It takes a lot of work,” said Jackie.
The weather in Luxembourg makes it even more complicated. If she uses the same products she would buy in Kenya, they won’t work the same way here, she said. “The weather is different. In the winter, you need to moisturise your hair all the time.” It will otherwise get so dry that “you can’t even comb it,” she said.
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Haircare is time-intensive. It is also expensive. While Jackie said it has become easier to find a salon, with more shops opening but also stylists offering services from their home, prices are high. Jackie paid upwards of €100 for her last trip to the hairdresser, a price not unusual for a women’s cut regardless of the type of hair.
But that is a problem not just in Luxembourg.
“The US was more difficult,” said Grace, who spent a gap year after high school in a small town in Oregon. Living in a predominantly white community with poor public transport, made it “tricky to find Black hair products and a hairdresser,” she said. “It can be the same in every country.”
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