When a breakout “It” girl is preparing for her very first Hollywood red carpet, she can expect a standard series of questions: Who are you wearing? What are your preshow rituals? Are you nervous? And now: Is that your real hair?
That’s how it went for Marty Supreme actress Odessa A’zion and her enviably thick corkscrew curls. In the weeks after the movie premiered, the internet buzzed with speculation about whether her voluminous hairstyle was a wig. The answer turned out to be “yes” and “no.” She had worn a wig to the Los Angeles premiere of the film but not the New York one. “You think I can afford a wig like that and wear it all the time?” she said later in a red-carpet interview. “Those are so expensive … I’ve heard wigs can go up to like $20,000 or $30,000. Are you fucking kidding me?”
Online, where debating which celebrities got a face-lift or chin implant is practically a sport, the latest obsession is spotting wigs, especially on white celebrities. Is that hairline too tidy? Wig. Is that middle part too dense or too wide? Wig. Is that a bit of lace sticking out around the ears? Wig. Is her hair actually that thick? Wig. Extensions wouldn’t look that good. Wig. Did she really bleach her hair again for the Met Gala? More like “Wig Gala.”
And now, people are going into salons with impossibly perfect inspiration photos. Jenna Perry, a celebrity hair colorist and salon owner, says, “We just have to guide them to know that that is indeed a wig.”
Even though their use has long been standard practice in the entertainment industry and popular in the Black community, wigs are still rarely discussed in the open as a beauty trick. For many women, whether they are experiencing hair loss or just want to avoid damaging dyes and heat styling, wigs are seen as admission of a problem. As Beyoncé put it, “the misconception is that people who wear wigs don’t have long and healthy hair.” (A misconception that plagues Black celebrities more often than white ones.) Before lace-fronts and other material advances, wigs didn’t look very realistic on anyone outside of the pages of Jet magazine. At Bronner Bros. hair shows, which started in the 1940s, theatrical wigs were presented as art, a beauty experience that influenced Black culture. Then came stars like Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige, who used wigs, weaves, and extensions to mold their images. In the 2010s, colorful, campy wigs were everywhere: Think Nicki Minaj’s split-dyed blonde hair with blunt bangs, Lady Gaga’s striking teal coif, and Kylie Jenner’s candy-colored styles.
Today, wigs are less visible and more popular than ever. While most celebrities carefully avoid confirming or denying whether they’re actually wearing one, wigs are slowly becoming less taboo and more widely recognized as just another high-end beauty treatment like lash extensions, Botox, and fillers.
“Wigs are mainstream for everybody now,” says Davontaé Washington, a hairstylist whose clients include Ciara, Janet Jackson, and Keke Palmer. “White celebrities use them for the same reason my Black clients always have: versatility, protection, and just keeping their real hair healthy. Everyone wants to switch looks without damaging their own hair.”
“I don’t even know what a wig is, but I also don’t know what not a wig is,” said Sabrina Carpenter in 2024, coyly responding to the rampant online speculation that her bouncy blonde curtain bangs and curls are a wig.
When Emma Stone shaved her head for her role in 2025’s Bugonia, she wanted to keep the plot point a secret from the public and wore a shoulder-length auburn wig to 2024’s New York Film Festival — where she was caught on-camera readjusting her hairline. “It was a great wig,” Stone said later. “But the whole night I was like, ‘Can you tell it’s a wig?’ ”
Last year, when Cardi B took the witness stand to defend herself in a lawsuit filed by a security guard, the entertainer flustered the opposing attorney by showing up each day in a different wig — one with platinum-blonde Hollywood waves, another a jet-black pixie with bangs. “Which one is your real hair? Or are they both real?” asked the lawyer. “They’re wigs,” she responded, giggling.
Even Nicole Kidman, long thought to be wearing them on the red carpet, appears to have finally admitted as much — at least on one recent occasion.
In May, she showed up at the Met Gala with an avant-garde pixie cut that shocked the internet. But three days later, at the Academy of Country Music Awards, her usual bust-length straight blonde hair was back. “I love changing my hair,” she said in an interview later in the month. “Everyone’s like, ‘Did you chop your hair off?’ I’m like, ‘No, I did not.’ ”
“The mystery of wigs has kind of been unveiled through social media,” says Shani Lechan, a New York–based wigmaker who started her business catering to Orthodox Jewish customers. Today, most of her clients are dealing with hair loss related to medical issues. But she is seeing a rise in a new type of buyer, people like aspiring actresses and CEOs who want to change their look but “don’t want to be bothered going to the hair salon every week,” she says.
Wigs come in every shape, size, and price point: real or synthetic, glueless or glued, full or partial (like a “fall” or U-shaped or V-shaped), lace front or full lace. The best wigs are an investment. For a one-off red-carpet look, a wig typically costs $1,500 to $3,000. More elaborate wigs designed to last longer — say, to survive an entire concert or weeks of filming — can run upwards of $15,000 depending on the type of hair, length, and quality of the lace base. Much of the cost goes into the hair itself, especially if it’s real human hair. The most sought-after is “virgin,” meaning chemically untreated, and comes from Russia and Eastern Europe, where hair is typically finer and silkier than that from other parts of the world. Hair from Southeast Asia is popular. Rare hair colors, blonde or red or gray, are the most expensive. And has been the case for so many consumer goods, raw-hair prices have spiked since the pandemic and with rising tariffs.
Then there’s the construction. Darnell Davis, a Detroit-based “wig engineer” who crafts couture-level pieces for Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson, says producing each of his creations takes about 120 hours over anywhere from three to eight weeks. “It’s not just something like you going in the store saying, ‘Yeah, I want a 40-inch bussdown,’ ” he says, referring to a style of wig that is long and sleek with a sharp middle part.
Davis begins by making a mold of his client’s head and tinting the lace foundation to their skin color. Thinner lace is less visible and better for red carpets and television appearances but more fragile. Davis prides himself on his natural hairlines, the way he “ventilates,” or knots the hair into the wig foundation, and the adjustments he makes throughout the process. He has at least one fitting with a client before finishing the hairline. “Now we have this 4K, 8K, 12K camera technology that is so detailed on what people see with their eye — the manipulation and creativity has to be on a whole other level,” he says. Davis’s most expensive wig ever, a 42-inch-long style made from natural gray hair, cost $35,000.
For celebrities who don’t have the time or budget for a custom creation from someone like Davis, there are other tricks to make wigs look more natural.
“Sometimes people will wear the wig a little bit further back so there’s no room for you to see it on Getty Images,” says Noah Scott, who has made wigs and hairpieces for Chappell Roan, Ariana Grande, and Noah Cyrus. While Scott usually makes full wigs, he also gets requests for ponytails and U-shaped wigs designed to sit underneath someone’s natural center part. When a wig is blended in with natural hair, however, the color and texture need to match exactly. Otherwise, “Page Six” will call you out for a “wig mishap” — a symptom of the anti-wig stigma that remains.
“I know that by working with a couple different A-list celebrities, 99 percent of them don’t want to say that they’re wearing a wig for an event or even for a movie,” says Lechan. These days, though a celebrity may post a red-carpet look and credit the dozens of behind-the-scenes people who designed their clothing or painted their nails, wigmakers are rarely publicly recognized for their work in the same way.
This may change. “More celebrities and influencers use wigs every day the same way they use makeup,” Washington says. “We don’t just wear wigs because we don’t have a lot of hair; we wear them to enhance our look,” adds Lacy Redway, a hairstylist who works with Roan, Tessa Thompson, and Pamela Anderson. “Hair is seen more as an accessory now.”
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