Wigs 101 (a.k.a. everything you wanted to know about wigs but were afraid to ask)

A few things you may not have guessed about what goes along with designing, making and wearing wigs.

Most of our wigs are made of human hair. We have a few synthetic wigs in each season (this year they're in All's Well on some of the men).

Most of the wigs are fully hand tied and take upwards of 40 hours to make from beginning to end. We also build facial hair as needed per show. Mustaches, beards, goatees, sideburns- even eyebrows!

We start out each season having our actors sit for a head wrap. We wrap their heads with plastic wrap, then cover that with scotch tape. We then trace their hairlines on the wrap. This way, we always have a mold of their heads at our disposal in the shop without having to constantly call them in for fittings.

We buy our hair from merchants in Los Angeles and New York. They get the hair from Asia where it was grown, cut, de-loused, color stripped, dyed the color needed, permed if needed, re-cleaned then sewn into the wefts or tracks of hair that we buy. We buy hair in all sorts of lengths, typically nothing shorter than 10' all the way to 30' in all sorts of colors. The most expensive hair is the white and grey hair or any hair beyond 22'long.

The process of tying hair is called 'ventilating'. (No, I don't know why it's called that.) When we ventilate, we are taking a couple of strands of hair at a time and knotting into a foundation net over and over again. Yes, it can be a strain on the eyes and yes, I sometimes think I must be nuts to do this for a living. But I love making wigs. It's a skill that not too many people know exists let alone can do! And yes, it takes a lot of patience to build a wig.

One of the best things I can overhear people say when they walk away from a show is, 'Was so-and-so wearing a wig? I couldn't tell!' It's one of the best compliments I can hear. I don't want you to be able to tell necessarily that someone is wearing a wig. I want it to look like it's hair growing out of their heads. That is unless it's a show where the actors are obviously wearing wigs. Then I like to overhear, 'Whoa! Did you see that wig on so-and-so? That was wild!'

Occasionally, things happen to wigs that make me stop in my tracks. For example, I recently had a wig built for a specific show and actor, fully hand tied and beautiful. We washed it, set it in rollers, styled it and had a fitting with the actor it was built for. We had some notes to do on it, so we took it out of the style, tied some more hair into it, washed it and let it dry. The next day, I brushed out the wig to give it a haircut and all the hair that was in the back part of the wig came untied and brushed out in clumps. By the time I finished brushing it, the back of the wig was bald and had to be re tied. I've never seen that happen before and after I finished freaking out, we fixed it and it was fine.