Do you know the difference between a sheitel and a wig?
If, like me, you know that sheitel is, in fact, the Yiddish word for wig, you probably think there’s no difference at all. But according to Natania Rafael-Friedman, they’re absolutely not the same thing.
“Traditionally, the hair in a sheitel is machine-sewn onto a fabric cap, and has fairly restricted movement,” she explains, “whereas in the wider wig-making world, for example for TV and film, they are aiming to imitate the natural hairline as much as possible and the hair will be hand-sewn onto a lace cap.”
Natania glam wig
Natania in one of her wigs
For Rafael-Friedman, a 35-year-old mother of two little girls, covering her hair with a sheitel after her marriage was never in question.
Her Jewish soul was sparked by a JFS trip to Gateshead in her mid-teens, and her religious observance grew steadily from then on. Following two years of intensive study in a Jerusalem seminary, she met and married her husband Shloime in 2012.
“I knew I wanted to cover my hair and it was —and still is — something that is very meaningful to me,” she says.
“But I was surprised by the effect my sheitel had on me. I felt very suffocated by it, and not at all myself.”
She has a creative spirit — growing up as the only child of a single mother in a one-bedroom flat on a rough council estate in Wembley, she immersed herself in arts and crafts, teaching herself to upholster furniture aged just 14, and turning all her jeans into skirts when she decided to stop wearing trousers for religious reasons.
An interest in hair and beauty was a natural progression, and she spent most of her Year 10 work- experience stint in a pharmacy, not stocking shelves and working on the till as she was meant to, but in the backroom threading the eyebrows of her colleagues.
Natania fringe wig
Natania in a fringe wig
By the time she married, she had started — and given up on— two academic degrees, and then taken the decision to set her sights firmly on the beauty industry.
Graduating from the London College of Beauty Therapy, she did a stint working at the salon in the Hilton Park Lane, before starting her own mobile beauty-therapy business, which she eventually relaunched as “Let Your Beauty Shine” salon at Jewish Care.
Manicures, make-up and bridal hair were the order of the day but her experiences with her own sheitel left her restless.
“I’m someone who could never ‘commit’ to a hairstyle,” she laughs. “I was always colouring my hair, changing my hairstyle, and I knew I needed to do something about my sheitel.”
In an act that must have seemed crazy at the time, she took a pair of scissors to her £1,500 sheitel, picking it apart and sewing in some cheap hair she’d bought in Harlesden.
“When I was finished, I posted a photo on Facebook and was overwhelmed by the response,” she recalls. “I started getting requests from friends to revamp their old sheitels.”
Self-teaching could only get her so far though, and she took herself off to study with a professional wigmaker, learning to produce authentic hand-tied, lace-cap hairpieces.
Natania poster
A poster for Natania's wigs
“By the time I was expecting my oldest daughter, I was doing beauty-therapy appointments back-to-back, bookings from two brides every Sunday and wig alterations at night. It wasn’t sustainable,” Rafael-Friedman says.
She decided to focus exclusively on wigs, producing her own “Rafaelie” line. From her tiny home-based salon in Edgware, she creates between eight and 12 custom hairpieces every month, with each wig taking around six weeks to produce.
“The sewing is actually the quickest part of the process,” she explains. “What takes time is making the cap and sourcing the perfect hair for the client. I see myself as a ‘hair artist’, not simply a wigmaker, and I want the piece to be a real reflection of their personality and lifestyle.”
Surprisingly, only just over half of her customers are Orthodox women looking for sheitels. The remainder of her clients come to her because of thinning hair, cancer treatment or alopecia.
For clients with none of their own hair, she will sew the wig with a medical cap, which is softer and has built-in silicone to keep it in place. Unlike traditional hair-loss clinics, she will never use glue or tape and prefers to seek out the most natural and comfortable innovations.
Her youngest client was just 12 years old, a Birmingham-based girl with alopecia.
“She came to me with her parents and her brother,”Rafael-Friedman recalls.
“The family had saved up so she could have a really natural wig that she could wear for school.
“We made her a fabulous shoulder-length piece with red dip-dyed ends and when she put it on for the first time, everyone got emotional.
“She was so young, but her attitude was exceptionally positive and confident.”
As well as running her thriving business, Natania teaches the Beauty Therapy BTEC at Gateways, the educational and vocational programme in JW3.
Meeting the King when he visited last year was a defining moment for her, but it’s her young students who provide her with the most inspiration. “I see so much of myself in them,” she says.
“Growing up on a council estate, I had all these dreams for myself but didn’t really believe I’d ever be able to achieve them.
"A lot of my students have such talent, and deep sensitivity, but they don’t realise the power they have inside of them. I believe that God has given me this gift of creativity to help people shine from within, and I’m so honoured to use it.”
Instagram: @rafaeliewigs/
