Les Ateliers Crépus is a house of hair rituals for coily and curly hair. We create hair care born from the Creole knowledge of Guadeloupe, brought together in our Rituel Texture®, and we train hairdressers in this texture, from the neighbourhood salon to the Paris Opera.
Behind the house there is a woman, Ghana Elin, and four generations of gestures handed down without ever being written. This page tells where we come from, what we do, and why.
In brief
- Founded
- House created in 2021 by Ghana Elin, after three years of workshops on natural coily hair, begun in 2018.
- What we do
- Hair care for coily and curly hair, and professional training courses for hairdressers.
- Method
- Our Rituel Texture®, in six steps, with three products: Le Shampoing Réparateur, Le Masque Réparateur and La Crème Coiffante.
- Manufacturing
- Hair care made in France, in the Ardèche, with 98% ingredients of natural origin.
- Training
- Qualiopi-certified training body since 6 January 2025. Teams trained at the Paris Opera, the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre du Châtelet and the Opéra national du Rhin.
- Network
- More than 80 partner salons across France, listed on the Our partners page.
A realisation on the metro
The story begins one day in 2018, on the metro. The carriage is packed, there are many Black women around me, and I notice that not one of them is wearing her coily hair natural.
Ghana Elin, founderGhana sees it as a problem of transmission: the know-how exists, but it is no longer being passed on. So she organises workshops to teach women, and a few men, how to care for their natural coily hair. It is a success. But what the participants talk about most of all is how hard it is to find a product truly suited to their hair.
Another sentence comes up again and again in those first workshops: “I would love to go to the hairdresser like everyone else.” These two gaps, suitable care and a trained hairdresser, became the two callings of the house, founded in 2021.
A heritage spanning four generations
Ghana grew up in Guadeloupe, surrounded by her grandmother, her mother and her aunts. With her grandmother, she would prepare the treatments: crushed avocado, hibiscus leaves and flowers worked into a mucilage, gestures you learn by doing them. Cocoa and hibiscus grew in the family's Creole garden.
At the far end of this line is Man Dol', her great-grandmother, whose coily hair reached down to her lower back. Every Sunday before Mass, a hibiscus treatment was applied and her hair was detangled with a horn comb. That weekly ritual gave rise to Le Peigne de Man Dol’, made from buffalo horn sourced from the food industry and hand-worked by a craftsman in Vietnam.
What was prepared in the morning and would not keep has become a stable formula. Hibiscus and cocoa are today at the heart of our hair care. The Jardin Créole campaign tells the story of that garden in detail.
A method: our Rituel Texture®
These family gestures have become a six-step method, from finger detangling on dry hair through to the final styling. Each step prepares the next, and the order matters more than the number of products.
Our Rituel Texture® brings together three products: Le Shampoing Réparateur, Le Masque Réparateur and La Crème Coiffante. The six steps are detailed in our free guide, and our experts adapt them to each head of hair during an online consultation.
Training hairdressers
In France, the syllabus of the CAP hairdressing diploma makes no distinction between hair textures. A student can graduate without ever having detangled, washed or cut a head of coily hair. Ghana saw this for herself while studying for her hairdressing diploma, after a first career as a lawyer.
Our professional training courses fill this gap. They are designed for salon-based and self-employed hairdressers, combine demonstrations, client cases and real-life salon issues, and end with a certificate of validated skills. The Paris Opera, the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre du Châtelet and the Opéra national du Rhin have all had their teams trained.
Trained salons join our network: more than 80 partner salons across France, in mainland France and the overseas territories. You can find a hairdresser near you.
What we stand for
With the Beauté pour tous collective, we uphold a simple principle: every woman has the right to go to the hairdresser like everyone else, whatever her hair texture. It is not a favour to be asked for, it is the profession practised in full. Our manifesto sets out what we stand for, in concrete terms.
We are also building what comes next with our community. Through the 1000 heads of coily hair programme, customers, hairdressers and beauty journalists take part in creating our next range: identifying needs, choosing ingredients, voting and testing.