What Beauty Salons Reveal About Resilience, Care, and Belonging: In Conversation with Annamaria Olsson
Annamaria Olsson is a Swedish activist, writer, and multi-award-winning social entrepreneur who has lived in Berlin since 2008. She has founded the NGOs Give Something Back to Berlin (today Hejmo) and Stories from the Beauty Parlor, as well as served as a freelance journalist for publications in Swedish, English, and German. She is a respected speaker and has presented at locations including the UN Headquarters in New York and Berlin, as well as contributed to courses at Harvard University on refugee integration in Germany. She loves creating and developing initiatives that blend storytelling, activism, community mobilization, and the arts, pushing boundaries to foster change in the critical issues of our time. Very often that means chatting to strangers and listening to the stories of neighbors, hairdressers, and taxi drivers rather than attending fancy conferences.
In this conversation, Lara Habboub, Communications Lead for the Democracy & Belonging Forum, speaks with Annamaria about beauty salons as overlooked spaces for political and social change, where beauty and joy become acts of resistance, sustaining communities under pressure and helping build bridges across cultures.
1- To start, could you tell us about your background and what led you to this work? You founded Give Something Back To Berlin (today Hejmo) over a decade ago, focusing on migration, integration, and countering xenophobia. What was the thread that carried you from that work into Stories from the Beauty Parlor?
My first NGO, Give Something Back to Berlin (GSBTB), taught me so much about everything. Life, love, loss, human nature, and myself. And also about starting small, growing big, and how belonging snowballs when shared spaces and connections are established. We soon became an internationally recognized best practice in the integration efforts following the 2015 migration movement to Europe. We mobilized thousands of people over 12 years and generated hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours. The organization is still up and running and hosts over 80 events per month, bringing migrants and locals together through culture, arts, and community organizing.
For me, this time also highlighted the need for women-only spaces and approaches. GSBTB runs Berlin’s biggest language café for newcomers. But to make language learning accessible to certain refugee and migrant women, we also had to create separate women-only spaces. Seeing how many multiple purposes the spaces played was eye-opening.
Directly upon arrival after their (often very traumatic) journeys in 2015, some women asked for donations of makeup and perfume. I remember some Germans being quite annoyed by that. Their responses were along the lines of: “Excuse me, what? You fled war and crossed the Mediterranean and now you want makeup?” Personally, I immediately understood where their need came from and happily started running around for nail polish and hair conditioner.
What brought me to the beauty salons that inspired Stories from the Beauty Parlor was a very personal experience. I was an exhausted first-time mum and went to a beauty salon in order to be taken care of for a moment, instead of caring for someone else. Beauty work is very intimate; there is closeness, touch, and the release of stress. As is so often the case during such a process, the beautician and I got to talking. There was an unexpected connection between her and me: she was a refugee from Kosovo, as is my partner. She is Roma and the story that she shared with me is of the sort that you don't usually get to hear in the media. This was a lightbulb moment for me as I realized that these female safe spaces hold so much potential for both storytelling and care.
Soon after that encounter, I handed over GSBTB (now Hejmo) to the next generation and started building Stories from the Beauty Parlor. Leaving the GSBTB when it was finally financially mature and stable was, of course, madness on so many levels. But if there’s calling… there's a calling!
The main thing I took away from my first founding journey into this one is to listen to your own intuition about where things are heading, and to dare to take on complex global issues with unorthodox, local approaches. Such as building solutions to counter feminist backsliding through beauty! And to always add layers of joy and belonging. Without those ingredients, you cannot build long-term engagement. Or create change.
2- Your project treats the beauty parlor as a space where important conversations happen, from gender inequality to climate change. What have these spaces revealed to you that you wouldn't have found through more conventional research or journalism?
I think the intimacy of such spaces enables completely different conversations than traditional research and media. Also, women and queer people feel so comfortable about sharing and talking there because it is their space, and chatting and listening are part of its DNA. There, nobody needs to be an expert on a topic or needs to perform.
The project has also revealed how women and queer communities worldwide have created and fostered these types of parallel, safe(r) third spaces, also as a reaction to being excluded by others. These spaces that are mostly seen as unpolitical, or even problematic, because on the surface they're about something labeled as superficial, especially in Western contexts. But in so many countries and communities, these places are about something completely different; they are about social interaction, connection, and belonging.
And like most things that carry a female connotation, so much of what women do or organize around is undervalued. What is not seen is the connection happening, the financial empowerment taking place, the culture and traditions being passed through generations, the spaces of trust, care, and belonging created for women whose voices and stories are silenced in so many other places.
In some circles, engaging with beauty is seen as incompatible with feminism, as a capitulation to patriarchy. But that assertion has proved itself wrong in every conversation and interview we've done in the context of Stories from the Beauty Parlor.
Untapped potential for development and support work. The people working in these salons are informal community influencers, trusted, embedded and present. In times when trust in institutions is collapsing, engaging authentic community influencers in vibrant third spaces such as beauty salons carries huge potential for more traditional “democracy work”. For example, hairdressers could be trained to share information about where to go if you're experiencing abuse, or to inform their clients about voting and other rights. There are pilots using this method ongoing in West Africa. In May of this year, Oxford University published a study about hairdressers as everyday influencers.
3- Your podcast series takes listeners into nail salons in Kosovo, drag spaces in Tbilisi, hammams in Morocco, hair salons serving also as bomb shelters in Ukraine, and beauty salons navigating authoritarianism in Turkey. Across these vastly different contexts, are there any common threads you've noticed about what women and queer people are navigating? How does the meaning of beauty and self-care change under different political conditions?
The first learning has been how similar many of the stories of women and queer communities are across completely different geographies and communities. Patriarchy and authoritarianism are truly a global reality, one that is easier to spot in communities of the other, but sometimes harder to recognize at home…
Having explored stories in these different places, I’m also convinced that joy and beauty become almost non-negotiable if you are from a community navigating a lot of parallel challenges. Sticking to beauty through distress is a way of creating normality and care (for yourself) in the middle of hardship. It is notable that among the first things that pop up in informal refugee camps are, for instance, a mini-market... closely followed by a hairdresser! It's an act of resilience.
For many queer communities, a beauty parlor is also where you become you. The same goes for minorities when being among peers who know how to treat your hair, how to prepare you for a wedding, how to create a look in line with your culture. So much othering is based simply upon how people look. It's not rocket science that spaces creating authentic care for that self will be empowering.
In many contexts, these humble spaces are almost informal therapy spaces. They are spaces where women feel they can belong, be cared for, express themselves, and carve out their (cultural) identity, while centering joy in an often very hostile world. In many cultures, there is a strong tradition of oral storytelling, which in places with a weak mental health infrastructure sometimes fills in the gaps, and sometimes replaces it.
As an example: I spoke to a woman who runs an Afro hair salon in Neukölln, Berlin. She was a women's rights activist in Gambia, organizing against the dictator, before she had to flee her country. She told me: "Honey, I'm the informal therapist of half the African community in Neukölln. That's my job. They sit in my chair — and Afro hair can take six, seven hours — you will get deep."
Also, in light of this, beauty is such an exciting prism for exploring where the world is at.
In our era of intertwined global crises and political ugliness, it makes sense that we cling to beauty much like Leonardo DiCaprio clung to his piece of wood with the Titanic sinking in the background. Wanting beauty in all its forms is a core human desire and cultural expression. Unfortunately, hyper-capitalism has its way of hijacking this (and many other) human needs (like food, sex, connection, etc.) into overconsumption, fueling unhealthy obsession.
That brings us to the other layer and overreaching goal of our project: to bring money from the $690 billion beauty industry to feminist grassroots organizations around the world. Organizations that are currently struggling with a right-wing backlash and global funding cuts. In this way, we link the storytelling that these spaces uncover with direct action for women’s and queer rights. Our goal is to set up a participatory feminist fund powered by the beauty companies. In the end, it is a form of wealth distribution, as women are the communities that create their profits. We aim to transform some of that obsessive capitalist self-care into community care.
4- Your work builds spaces of intimate solidarity both locally in Berlin and through initiatives like your Community Care Fundraising, which has connected a range of causes from the women's organizations in Gaza to Iranian "Women, Life, Freedom" activists and women's advocates in Sudan and Georgia. What does belonging mean to you in this work, and what does it take to hold such different struggles together in a meaningful way?
Personally, I think it's so much easier to think about what bridges these struggles than about what separates them, across all the different fronts on which women and queer communities are fighting. The many wars, imperial ideologies and extremist movements, across different religions and regions, have deeply patriarchal roots. Zooming out from one specific context makes it even easier to see the "same same but different."
Much of identity politics over the last decade or so highlighted the very subjective realities people carry. A lot of that was necessary to raise awareness. But now, combined with the increasing algorithmic polarization and an overall lack of belonging, I think many people are hungry to bridge across their differences. Culture-specific safer spaces for vulnerable communities are very important. But taking part in work and projects like ours makes you feel less alone and creates another type of belonging at a time when feminist spaces to belong and take action are shrinking. We take action locally but understand that the challenges are global.
One example of how we do this is that our community fundraisers always raise funds for two different grassroots organizations, in order to build bridges between communities and causes. In our first year, we did events for Iran-Sudan, Syria-Georgia, Gaza and Ukraine. There’s always a lot of learning and unlearning around every event. For instance, around Gaza and Ukraine, we had several conversations in the team and with the communities involved around questions like: “How can we bridge this when Ukraine is dependent on US military aid for its survival as a nation while the same weapons are enabling a genocide in Gaza?”. Having these conversations in real life across communities differently impacted by geopolitical conflict is part of the process. Meeting and seeing each other's humanity on the dance floor, getting henna or nails done by a community member, and fundraising for each other's causes are part of the bridge-building process.
For a lot of diasporic communities, being involved in awareness and fundraising, sharing their culture through joy and beauty makes them feel like they belong. Especially in political times when their home countries might be mostly “bad news” in the media, or anti-migrant narratives are disintegrating them from the majority society. Being involved in our community events helps them feel connected to their roots while bridging the “outer world”. It makes you feel less powerless.
5- We're living through a global feminist backlash marked by rising authoritarianism, attacks on LGBTQIA+ rights, and narrowing space for feminist organizing. Where do you see this most directly in your own work? And how has connecting with people across different countries and cultures helped you deal with that, and how do you keep building those connections?
I got the initial idea for Stories from the Beauty Parlor in summer 2023, before Trump's re-election and before the frantic funding cuts by Germany’s ultra-conservative Chancellor Merz or the politically instrumentalized crackdown on civil society in the aftermath of October 7th. Even before these developments, only 1–2% of all global funding went to feminist projects. Being enraged by that number is what made me start playing with the idea for the project. Since then, everything has escalated quickly, and now the funding stress is a big part of more or less every meeting we have within the feminist movement.
So much more time is also spent now fundraising for breadcrumbs to keep initiatives barely floating because the cake has gotten so much smaller. Instead of initiatives having time to actually do their important work, we end up… writing more proposals for a few peanuts. That’s why more organizers need to take on the challenge of mobilizing more money for the ecosystem and not shy away from unorthodox approaches and allies. As we have seen lately, the government institutions have not always been our friends.
Here we can learn a lot from feminist organizers from the Global Majority, since being underfunded is by no means a new situation for them. Many of them also have lived through and maneuvered through several waves of authoritarianism in their own home countries. There is so much expertise to tap into there!
The other side of the current feminist backlash is that we are also seeing intensified and invigorating collaboration, because the enemy is so big and resources are SO scarce. I have a small dacha in an old GDR summer house colony, in an impoverished region of Germany. My neighbors always talk nostalgically about how close they were and how much they needed to collaborate with each other during GDR times. It was a Zweckgemeinschaft, a community forced to collaborate because there was no other way. This is what we are seeing now and that can also be an opportunity.
6- Looking ahead, what is giving you hope right now? Are there particular communities, partnerships, or stories on the horizon that make you feel the work is not just necessary but genuinely possible?
Living in Berlin and having studied my fair share of history, it is obvious that things are going to get worse before they are going to get better. Being involved in building Stories together with a lot of other wonderful women from all over the world, who all have their personal experiences of patriarchy’s 50 shades of ugly faces, keeps me both energized and sane. There’s so much collective intelligence working in multicultural environments. And then there are always some glimpses of hopeful news around! Having worked closely with the Syrian community for the last decade, now seeing friends go back to visit family or, in some cases, take part in rebuilding the country is one of the examples and reminders that things can actually change despite how bleak things might look at a certain moment. This September, we're going to visit our partner in (Iraqi) Kurdistan, a young feminist organization setting up one of Kurdistan's first feminist funds. Since Stories from the Beauty Parlor is also on a mission to mobilize more resources for feminist grassroots organizations, we are on a shared learning journey about how to set up these funds without reproducing harmful power dynamics. And of course, we will visit beauty salons around the country, collecting stories and making a podcast episode. Working with the next generation of doers and makers always gives me so much hope and joy.