BOTANICA ©️ 2015
Botanica©
This one belongs to 2015 — the textile era, when I was living next door to my mum. She'd be out in her garden and I'd come out in whatever fantasy wig I'd been experimenting with that week, and we'd end up talking over the fence about it. It became a small shared joy between us, and this piece carries that association for me.
Botanica© started life as a platinum blonde wig, worked using a resist art technique — a method built on masking off certain areas so colour can't reach them, then removing the mask to reveal the design underneath. It's the same basic principle behind traditions like batik and shibori, arrived at here through play rather than through any formal textile training. Colour was worked through the base first to build the floral shapes, then a temporary black overlay was set across the whole piece and allowed to dry before being removed to reveal the flowers beneath — vivid against black, like a print rather than something painted on.
It was pure playfulness. Treating the wig as fabric — a surface you could resist, dye, and reveal, rather than just colour in the usual sense.
A Note on the Photographs
The original photographs of this piece aren't the clearest, and it's worth saying why. They were taken on a Kindle Fire, and unknown to me at the time, with a yellow filter active — which throws off the true floral colours quite a bit. One shot of me wearing the wig was also taken with the curtains closed, so the light wasn't right either. I've used photo software to clean these up as best I can, but each pass brings back a slightly different colour range, so what you're seeing is my best attempt at getting close to the truth of it, not a perfect record. I think it's enough to grab the idea and the playfulness behind it, even if it isn't a crisp, true-colour reference.
Would This Work as a Permanent Style?
Something worth being honest about: this was done with temporary products, and I've thought about whether the same effect could be achieved permanently, on real hair. My best guess is that the cleanest way to try it would be on wefts rather than a full head — human hair wefts are thinner, even doubled up, which should hold a crisper floral edge than trying to resist and tint a whole section in place. Using permanent tint or a strong direct dye with the same resist idea, then sewing the finished wefts into a centre parting of a human hair wig, feels like the most realistic route to keeping the effect intact. I haven't tried it. This is a direction, not a tested method.
I'm sure other artistic people have played with floral resist patterns in hair before — I wouldn't claim otherwise. But it was such a fun, playful idea to arrive at on my own that I think it's worth documenting anyway, question mark and all. If it's the kind of thing that makes someone else want to try it, take it further, or do it better than I did, all the better.
AI-assisted visualisations (Grok, xAI) used for editorial presentation only. Photo software used to clarify the original, poorly lit photographs. Wig, cut, colour and technique are the original work of Karen Tonks.
