  We derive bounds on the electric and chromo-electric dipole moments of the
charm quark. The second one turns out to be particularly strong, and we
quantify its impact on models that allow for a sizeable flavour violation in
the up quark sector, like flavour alignment and Generic U(2)^3. In particular
we show how the bounds coming from the charm and up CEDMs constrain the size of
new physics contributions to direct flavour violation in D decays. We also
specialize our analysis to the cases of Supersymmetry with split families and
composite Higgs models. The results exposed in this paper motivate both an
increase in experimental sensitivity to fundamental hadronic dipoles, and a
further exploration of the SM contribution to flavour violating D decays.
