For Haitians around the world, May 18 isn’t just another date on the calendar.
It’s Haitian Flag Day. A celebration of our unity, our defiance, and our pride. It’s a day when red and blue line the streets, the music gets louder, and even in the diaspora, you can feel the pulse of something deep and ancestral. You see it on bumper stickers. On headwraps. On storefronts. You hear it in the drums, in the kompa, in the voices that shout, “Sak pase?” with even more joy than usual.
May 18 is a flag day. But not just in the literal sense.
It’s a reminder of who we are and how we came to be.
Why May 18 Matters
Haitian Flag Day honors the creation of the Haitian flag on May 18, 1803, in the town of Arcahaie, eight months before Haiti would become the first free Black republic in the world.
The flag was sewn by Catherine Flon, goddaughter of revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines. She took the French tricolor and removed the white, symbolically rejecting colonial rule. The red and blue were stitched together to represent unity: Black and mixed-race Haitians standing side by side in the fight for liberation.
This flag was more than a symbol. It was a turning point. A shared identity. A declaration that even before our independence was official, we had already claimed ourselves.
For many of us in the diaspora, Flag Day carries a power that runs deeper than any single anniversary. It’s the moment we stopped waiting for permission and started claiming our place.
Pride That Doesn’t Fade
We grew up in a very Haitian household. Everyone in our family is Haitian—parents, stepparents, extended family, all of us. We always joke that when our parents remarried, they just married more Haitians. That’s how deep it goes.
Our heritage isn’t something we perform. It’s something we live.
Every time someone in our family gets a new car, our stepdad puts Haitian flag stickers on every side—and on the inside too. The license plate? Haitian-coded. The music? Always. It’s part of the fabric. We carry it with us everywhere we go.
That’s the kind of love we grew up with. Pride in our people. Pride in our origins. Pride that doesn’t need to shout to be felt.
Why Orijin Was Born in May
When we were planning Orijin’s launch in 2022, we didn’t just pick a random date. May 18 was the obvious choice.
But that year, Flag Day fell midweek. And we wanted to gather our people, to celebrate not just a product, but a lineage. So we chose May 22.
We knew what it meant to bring this brand into the world under the shadow of that flag. Because Orijin, too, is a declaration. A reclamation of beauty, of ritual, of memory. A refusal to let our heritage be flattened or forgotten.
Orijin isn’t a brand that exists apart from history. It’s shaped by it. Informed by it. Called forward by it. And this moment, this season, still reminds us why we started
What We Raise
Orijin was never just a skincare brand.
It is, and always has been, a declaration.
A marker of identity.
A return to what was already ours.
A way to say, through beauty: Nou la.
So we celebrate May 18.
And we celebrate May 22.
One reminded us of who we are.
The other reminds us of what we’ve built.