-A sheitel macher is a person who washes, styles,
sells basically everything wig related
for Orthodox Jewish women.
And if you love the way you look in your wig,
that's going to make you want to cover your hair even more.
Hey, my name is Tallie
and I'm a wig stylist for Orthodox Jewish women.
In Judaism, a woman covers her hair because,
once she marries, her hair becomes private for her husband.
Now modesty in Judaism is referred to as privacy.
The special things in our life, we like to keep private.
And our hair, being that it makes up
so much of who we are as women, that is something special
that we are setting aside for our husbands.
Before I got married,
I actually really anticipated wearing a wig.
You know, my hair was frizzy
and I'm, like, how awesome would it be to wake up every day
and have a good hair day? I was really struggling
with how to make them look right, more like me.
I felt very lost and I didn't feel myself.
I just had moved to L.A.
and I was looking for something to keep me busy.
My husband suggested why don't you start washing
and styling wigs and so I did.
And from there I started experimenting with color.
And from color I started selling wigs
and it kind of just took off from there.
The name of my brand is TNT Wigs.
We are a full-service salon.
We offer wig purchases, wig repairs, color, cuts.
We basically do it all.
Because this is such a personal journey,
so many women can keep this mitzvah
in so many different ways. There's women who wear scarves.
There's women that will wear wigs and not show any hair.
Some women will take out a little bit of hair.
And my job is to meet you wherever you're at.
It's important for women to feel beautiful
and confident in their wigs
because that's one of the only ways
that they're going to want to continue doing this mitzvah.
And nowhere in the Torah does it say
that a woman can't look beautiful.
We're supposed to be beautiful. In terms of covering your hair,
it's not about if they know if it's a wig or not.
The only important factor here
is that you know you are covering your hair.
These are all 100% human hair wigs.
We have multiple suppliers in China
where we get our wigs from, and
you can basically do anything you want to these wigs --
anything you would do to regular hair.
Here we have a silk-top wig where there's an actual scalp
already built into the wig. They're very durable.
Not as delicate as the lace-top wigs.
This is a lace-top wig.
It is an ear-to-ear lace and what we did in here
was we added her a strip of velvet
in order to keep this wig on her head.
Because if you compare it to the silk,
the silk has a front comb, whereas the lace does not.
So if you take a look at the scalp,
there's different things that we can do
to make the lace look even more realistic.
I always do like suggesting that my clients line their lace,
but we do have different colors and fabrics of lining
that you can choose from.
And then I do like to match up the lining
based off their skin tone. Here we have a band fall.
It is meant to be worn with headbands, caps, hats.
Okay. So let me show you what a band fall looks like.
So the headband is meant to cover that front seam.
If you wanted to wear it like a turban,
wear it like that. A lot of my clients
that work in, like, hospitals, teachers,
they usually gravitate toward the band fall
because it's just easier.
They don't have hair in their face.
A wig in this salon ranges anywhere from,
I would say, eight hundred to, like, three thousand --
based off length, and sometimes based off color.
A wig should last, I would say, if you take care of it
I would give it a good five years.
What does it mean that a wig is kosher?
Years ago
it was said women were giving their hair up for idol worship
and that that hair was being used to make wigs.
In Judaism, we are not allowed to use anything
that was once used for idol worship.
These are kosher wigs that have not been used for idol worship.
So today we're going to be seeing Chana.
She is a long-time client of mine
and she actually has a few pieces from our line.
She's going to be coming in today for a new wig consult,
and we're going to walk you through it.
-Hi! -What's up?
-How are you? -I'm good.
-Show me what you got. -I just happen
to love a natural wig.
I am surrounded by all sorts of people
and I don't necessarily want it to be like,
oh, she's wearing a wig.
I do want it to look very natural,
not that I would be embarrassed by it at all.
I love that I cover my hair and I have so much fun with it.
But for me it does need to look natural.
There's definitely community. We'll all come to the salon.
We love, love to try on wigs together. We'll talk about it.
You don't feel like you're necessarily alone
and you guys just give each other ideas
and really have fun with it.
It becomes something, -- instead of, like,
oh, we have to do this -- it becomes, like, oh, my gosh.
How cool we can do this.
-You haven't taken out hair from this yet?
-No, we haven't. -But it's so glam.
Maybe we'll just take out hair from the sides.
-And leave the back. -Exactly.
So that you have your fullness in the back,
but from the sides we could take out wefts just so that --
because not many people have a ton of hair around their face.
-It's fuller and I like also
that it's a little longer than what I normally wear.
-Once I do all of that here,
we'll send it for color.
Once we get it back from color, we'll cut the lace
because that has to be the last. Because she's going to --
you know, she's going to work on the wig
and we don't want to stretch out the lace.
-Okay. -So the last, last thing
we'll do is cut the lace.
We'll really get to work on it and we'll finish up the rest.
This is a lace-top wig that is wefted.
A weft is a row of hair --
a row of hair that we can sew into a wig
and they kind of go all the way around, sewn in by rows.
Chana came in -- she wanted some work done
to a few of her wigs. Okay.
So this wig, we are removing some wefts from the sides
so that she can still have fullness,
but just so much fullness around her face.
And I'm going to stop at the seam right in the center,
right in the middle of the back of the wig.
I'm going to show you.
And here you see the weft starts to come undone.
And I'm just going to tack it down where I cut
so that the weft doesn't continue to unravel.
Okay. And that's basically how it will look, all the way down,
and essentially make it less heavy around her face.
Once we get all the work done in-house, that --
it needs to go for color to the colorist,
and so we probably have a finished product
in about two to three weeks.
-This mitzvah,
I really hold it dear to me and I really believe in it.
I think that, you know, in your marriage
when you have a few things that are really private,
and that's something that's just for you and your husband,
I think that that really creates a stronger bond.
There -- it's such a shock sometimes for people to see
religious people that are also, you know, somebody fashionable.
And so I think it's important for people to realize just,
like, that there's so much more to people
than what meets the eye.
-Wigs are so popular right now
that everybody wants in on it.
It's really a place for you to kind of let loose.
Once you let loose and you're cool with the idea that,
hey, I'm covering my hair, I might as well have fun
with it, anything can happen.