Lucie Minty
Specialist Practice
Hair
When deciding what hair I needed to buy for my wig I had to consider what colour and type of hair would work best. My research and designs really helped this process as I had a developed idea of what texture and colour I wanted the hair to be. I knew from creating small samples that synthetic hair wouldn't work well because it wouldn't dread and also wouldn't have a realistic final finish. In some of my final developed designs I would also need to add a lot of heat to the hair for the best results when styling and this wouldn't be possible with synthetic hair. I looked at a few different options of different human and animal type hair before deciding which would give my wig the texture I desired while constantly considering my budget.
Yak Hair
I then started looking at other alternatives to make the wig out of or to incorporate into the wig along with human hair so looked at animal hair. Firstly I looked at Yak hair, it was very wirey and course. It looked as if it would be harder than human hair to style. I looked on Banbury Postiche and the Yak hair was a lot cheaper than human hair but only came in the two colours, this wouldn't be a problem because I could experiment with ways to dye the Yak hair.
Human Hair
I knew for the best realistic results human hair would work best for my wig. The main negative aspect of using human hair is the cost. I researched places to buy hair and the two places I found were Banbury Postiche and Hugo Royer.
Asian hair was the cheapest type of hair to buy which only Banbury Postiche stoked, so keeping my budget in mind decided this would be the best place to buy the hair. I researched into wigs and found that an average human hair wig should weigh 250g, the weight varies on certain things like length and thickness of the wig. Banbury Postiche sold Asian hair in packs of 250g, I didn't want to risk buying just one pack and not having enough hair to complete the wig but buying two packs would be a lot more money and would be over what I budgeted to spend on hair.
Horse Hair
I then looked at horse hair. Horse hair was slightly more expensive than Yak hair but still a lot cheaper than human hair. Unfortunately I couldn't get a sample of the horse hair to see its texture, so just had to research into as much as I could.
I found that horse hair was still very course like Yak hair, but wasn't quite as bad.
A pro to horse hair is the length of it. The longest Asian hair I could buy is 35cm long where as horse hair is 50cm long.
Crepe Wool
I searched for other options of hair I could use in my wig. I found Banbury Postiche sold Crepe wool, which I have used previously in other projects to lay on the face. The texture isn't as wirey as Yak hair, instead has a more frizzy appearance. For my witches wig I want an out of control appearance so the texture of Crepe wool could work if I mixed it with human hair.
The price of crepe wool is very reasonable and I liked the texture so I practiced knotting crepe wool making a small sample.
The crepe hair was quite difficult to knot because all the hair was different lengths it was harder to catch the hair in the knotting hook and pull through the foundation.
When the crepe hair is braided it is very long but even if you cut a long section of it to steam and then hackle, it looses all the length which I don't want.
After long consideration I decided to order human hair and horse hair for my wig. I Chose to mix the two together because I wanted it too look realistic and I wanted to be able to add heat to the wig when styling it so chose to make the majority of the wig from human hair. To bulk the wig out and add length I chose to use horse hair as it was the closest texture I wanted the wig to be and was much more cost effective than buying two lots of human hair. By using horse hair and human hair this means I can style the final wig using heat and I will be able to dread it.