People tend to make negative assumptions about women who wear wigs. Some of the more prevalent ones include the assertion that you’re trying to hide your actual hair because you don’t like something about it, or that you’re attempting to look like someone else. That may be the case for some, but plenty of women enjoy wigs simply because of the options they provide and the convenience. For Porsha Williams, she wears them because she likes the sense of adventure they provide her.
As she told Allure in a recent interview about her collection and her hair line, Go Naked Hair, she wore partial wigs here and there while on the dance team in high school. She didn’t start wearing full wigs until her Real Housewives of Atlanta years. And while all of the women on the show enjoy a good wig (except Kenya Moore), Williams started wearing them for a unique reason.
In the interview, it’s shared that after her shocking divorce from Kordell Stewart (she found out he filed online like the rest of us), Williams used wigs to help her have fun and feel confident in herself again:
Williams is the first to tell you that her obsession is frivolous and financially consuming. But it’s also rooted in a sense of adventure and possibility — the kind that comes from adopting a different personality on a whim. She started her business and became interested in wearing hair after her divorce, when she was experiencing an injury to her self-esteem and found that tapping into different archetypes of her personality (fierce Porsha, fun Porsha, blonde-lob Porsha) helped her fall back in love with regular Porsha.
She now has 40 wigs, some you’ve most definitely seen her switch in and out of on RHOA. The process she goes through to make a full wig is extensive. She has multiple suppliers she works with, from whom she chooses human hair.
“If I want a short wig, I’ll still do long hair because I want it to be thick,” she said.
From there, she gives the hair to the wigmakers she works with, who will decide on a color, if necessary. From there, they attach lace that matches Williams’s skin tone to the hair, and then a stylist cuts the hair to match the beauty’s face shape and features. When that’s all said and done, the hair is entered into her massive wig room in her home outside of Atlanta. The hair is taken care of by her assistant, who photographs the hair, makes sure it’s still up to par for Williams, and if not, has it taken to the salon to be restyled or colored.
“When my assistant got hired, he didn’t think that half of his job would be maintaining my babies,” she told Allure.
For all of the work she puts into maintaining and enjoying her wigs, over the years, Williams has put in similar hard work for her natural hair:
She has cut it since these images, doing so in 2016. And while she started wearing wigs to, interestingly, feel like herself again, she also embraces them nowadays, like the rest of us, for the help they can be to her own strands.
“I did a big chop to switch it up,” she told Essence, “but during filming, or when I have a lot of appearances, I like protect my natural hair.”