Nobody Has Measured Whether the Law Worked

The CROWN Act — Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair — prohibits discrimination based on hair texture and on hairstyles associated with race. It is the rare piece of appearance legislation that dermatology has publicly campaigned for, and the case for it is one most people find obvious the moment it is described.

In 2026 a team ran a scoping review to find out what it had achieved. Six databases, 2019 to 2024, PRISMA extension for scoping reviews. Three hundred and ten articles screened, fifteen included.

Their finding: no studies directly measure its mental health impact.

Existing evidence suggests reducing discrimination may alleviate chronic stress, they write, but the findings remain inferential.

A note on what I am not going to tell you

The papers in this literature refer to it as the CROWN Act of 2022. A 2021 dermatology commentary describes it as recently passed by several states and by the House of Representatives.

I am not going to give you a count of jurisdictions where it is currently law, because I could not verify a current one, and a number I cannot source is exactly the kind of thing this section exists to catch other people doing.

What is not in question is the direction of travel and the reason for it. People have been sent home from school and dismissed from jobs over locs, braids and knots, on the stated basis that those styles are unprofessional.

What has actually been measured

The strongest study in this area is not about the law. It is about the room.

A 2025 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology recruited 1,693 Black women — exclusively, which is worth pausing on, because the usual design would have recruited everybody and then run a subgroup — across four studies.

In the first, women’s perceptions that their organization favored natural hair significantly predicted both how authentic they felt at work and how much hair discrimination they experienced. That held even after controlling for whether Black employees were present, and whether employees with natural hair were present.

Which is a sharper result than it first appears. The signal was not simply representation. An organization could have Black employees and still read as a place where your hair was a problem.

In the experimental studies, seeing an employee with a natural hairstyle — Black or white — increased participants’ sense of authenticity. But only a Black employee with natural hair reduced anticipated hair discrimination. And a Black employee, whatever their hairstyle, was what produced belonging and trust.

Then the fourth study did the thing that makes this useful. It manipulated the signal directly — conveying that natural hair was valued, without showing any employee at all — and that alone increased authenticity and reduced anticipated discrimination.

So the photograph is only part of the mechanism. The other part is whether the organization has actually said the thing.

Alongside this sits a 2026 theoretical model in the Journal of Applied Psychology describing how hair microaggressions produce identity threat and adverse outcomes at work, with particular attention to intersectionality. It is a model paper — a framework and a research agenda, not data — and I flag that because the distinction between a tested finding and a proposed structure is the distinction this whole section runs on.

The part this section can measure

A beauty publication has something to add here that the psychology literature does not.

A professional norm that requires straightened hair is not enforced by opinion. It is enforced by chemistry and by tension, and both of those have been measured.

Relaxers: every product sampled in one analysis sat above the corrosive threshold, with a median pH of 12.36, including the no-lye versions marketed as gentler. Keratin smoothing treatments: the American rule restricting formaldehyde in them has been announced, delayed and re-announced for years without ever being written. Tension: traction alopecia prevalence rose from 8.6 percent in the first year of school to 21.7 percent in the last, in girls wearing the styles that school policies permit. And the epidemiology of relaxer use and uterine cancer has produced two cohorts pointing the same direction at different magnitudes.

Those are not opinions about professionalism. They are pH readings, prevalence surveys and cohort studies.

Which means a dress code that makes natural hair a liability has a dermatology bill attached to it, and that bill is itemized across this section. The scarring at the hairline is permanent. The chemical exposure is repeated, in a regulatory environment that has never finished the rule.

Nobody has run the study connecting the two ends — grooming-policy environment on one side, measured scalp and hair outcomes on the other. That is the trial this field is missing, and it would not be difficult.

Why the missing evidence matters more than it sounds

It would be easy to read the scoping review as a technicality. The harm is obvious, the law is sensible, who needs a randomized trial.

Except that policy which rests on inference gets challenged on inference. The scoping review’s own recommendation is for longitudinal and quantitative studies, explicitly in order to strengthen advocacy and policy efforts, and the people who wrote it are not skeptics of the law.

There is also a subtler cost. Without measurement, nobody can tell which part is doing the work — whether it is the statute, the organizational signal the psychology studies isolated, or simply the conversation the statute started. The fourth experiment above suggests a workplace can move the needle by stating a position, with no legislation involved at all. That is useful, actionable and currently better evidenced than the law itself.

Where that leaves an individual decision

If you run or influence a workplace, the finding to act on is the cheapest one in the literature: saying that natural hair is welcome, in writing, changed how Black women anticipated being treated even with no other change. It cost nothing, and it came out of a four-study program covering 1,693 people.

If you are weighing what to do with your own hair, the honest position is that this is a real constraint and not a personal failing, and that the decision is yours to make with the actual numbers in hand rather than the vague ones. The chemistry is corrosive at a measured pH. The tension damage accumulates and eventually stops being reversible. Those facts do not tell you what to do. They tell you what you are trading.

And if you are a clinician being asked about this, the useful thing is not advice to stop. It is knowing at which point the follicle stops coming back, and saying so early enough to matter.

This article is educational and is not a substitute for care from someone who can look at your skin. Anything new, changing, painful or spreading should be assessed rather than researched.