00:00 When I first opened Ghali's Couture Wigs,
00:02 I made a promise.
00:03 Nobody walks away from me or my wigs unhappy.
00:07 - The thing that scared me away from wigs the most
00:22 when I started was just like,
00:23 there's nothing worse than a bad wig.
00:25 I mean, I remember one place,
00:26 the girl was like fitting me for a wig.
00:27 She's like pulling at my head.
00:28 I was like, oh, this hurts a little bit.
00:30 She's like, well, it's gonna be uncomfortable.
00:31 You're wearing a wig.
00:32 - Yes. - Absolutely.
00:33 - The other salons that I had ventured to,
00:35 there wasn't that love, there wasn't that warmth.
00:38 There wasn't a sense of community.
00:40 - The salon owners were cold.
00:42 They seemed annoyed that I was taking up
00:45 too much of their time.
00:47 - But in our black culture,
00:48 we're so used to very short today,
00:51 add extension the next day, add extensions.
00:55 You do anything to it.
00:56 It's a fun way to express your beauty.
01:00 - And it's so crazy how much emphasis we put on hair
01:04 and the look and how you feel with a new haircut.
01:07 And if you like it, you're rocking it.
01:09 And if you don't like it,
01:10 you're hiding under a cap until your hair grows out.
01:13 - I was diagnosed with a really rare form
01:15 of ovarian cancer when I was 24.
01:18 It was a cancer that I would definitely need
01:20 to treat with chemotherapy.
01:22 And I mean, the first thing you think of
01:24 when you hear chemotherapy is,
01:26 "Oh God, is my hair gonna fall out?"
01:28 I think it was around my third week of chemo treatment.
01:31 That was when I was brushing my hair
01:32 and it was coming out in clumps.
01:35 And I just remember looking at myself in the mirror
01:37 and I didn't even recognize myself.
01:39 I decided to shave it and I took some control back that way,
01:41 but at the end of the day, it wasn't my choice.
01:44 I felt like I was losing everything.
01:48 And as soon as anyone would look at me on the street,
01:51 they would say, "Oh, well, there's something wrong with her."
01:53 (gentle music)
01:56 - The one thing that I wish I realized
02:00 when I first found out that my hair was gonna fall out
02:02 is that the shame I was feeling was not unique to me
02:07 and I wasn't by myself.
02:10 - At the beginning, it's hard.
02:11 You're trying to understand yourself,
02:13 work with everything that's happening with you at once.
02:17 My name is Natasha.
02:20 I am the wig surgeon.
02:22 Anything that needs to be done
02:23 to a wig, I do that.
02:25 As I am growing up, getting into my womanhood,
02:29 understanding who I am as a black woman
02:33 by doing my hair, my friend's hair,
02:36 add an extension, do a braid.
02:39 That leads me to Galley.
02:41 It was like a breath of fresh air.
02:43 - I got to know and learn the depth of wearing a wig.
02:48 - Once I lost my hair, I thought,
02:52 "This is it, never going to be in a relationship.
02:55 I'm going to stay home.
02:56 I'm gonna be an old spinster.
02:58 Life is over."
03:00 And I was just so heartbroken.
03:02 - In 2003, I got married and everyone goes into marriage
03:05 with all of their best hopes and intentions
03:08 and it didn't work out.
03:09 It led to a very sad, heartbreaking divorce.
03:13 And I started to have stress-induced alopecia areata.
03:18 (gentle music)
03:21 (gentle music)
03:24 I was under a tremendous amount of emotional stress,
03:29 financial stress.
03:31 I think that my body responded in rejecting my hair.
03:36 I would see myself with these bald patches
03:40 and it would hurt my heart deeply.
03:43 I was wearing bandanas and I had someone come up to me
03:47 at a meat market.
03:49 "Oh, you have cancer?
03:53 Are you on chemo?"
03:55 And I turned around, "Who's he talking to?
03:58 I don't have cancer."
04:01 And I said, "Oh, it's my bandana.
04:03 It's so obvious that I don't have hair under this."
04:06 - As women, we're told we have to be skinny
04:09 and we have to have a smooth face and be contoured.
04:12 And I think that when you have short hair,
04:14 there's no hiding behind the contour.
04:16 - Right, right. - So true.
04:18 I was in my senior year of college
04:21 and I thought it was gonna be the best year of my life.
04:24 I had beautiful, long hair.
04:27 It held curls, it held straight, it held everything.
04:30 My hair was my identity, my hair was me.
04:33 I was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma bone cancer.
04:36 When I was first admitted to Sloan Kettering,
04:38 they told me that I needed seven rounds of chemotherapy
04:41 that would get rid of all the body hair on my body.
04:45 I looked the doctor in the eyes and I said,
04:48 "I'm gonna be the one that beats the chemotherapy
04:50 and doesn't lose my hair."
04:51 I was in denial.
04:53 I remember when I did wind up losing my hair,
04:56 I didn't look in the mirror for two weeks.
04:58 I just felt like, "How am I gonna be pretty without hair?"
05:02 Every emotion was going through my head
05:04 and at that point, I was really
05:06 in the throes of survival mode.
05:08 My mom found Charlene.
05:09 I went in with my hat and I walked out with my hair.
05:13 - My husband and I, we got married in 2001
05:16 and we're Orthodox Jews, but we kind of served God our way,
05:20 which was not really the correct way.
05:22 I prayed, I kept kosher, I did all of the mitzvahs,
05:25 but the one thing that was so hard for me
05:27 was anything on the outside, the external mitzvahs.
05:29 And as an Orthodox Jew, we're expected to cover our hair
05:33 after we get married.
05:34 I wasn't doing that.
05:39 We had a bit of an outlandish lifestyle,
05:41 jet setting, yachts, fabulous, phony, obnoxious,
05:45 fake parties with all these top celebrities and CEOs.
05:50 I had had my fourth child.
05:51 Thank God now there's five.
05:52 We were vacationing in Miami Beach.
05:54 We decided we're gonna go spend the day
05:56 at the shore with the older boys.
05:58 We're gonna leave Gali, who had just turned two,
06:00 at the pool, asleep on a lounge chair with my nanny.
06:03 Finally, we get back to shore
06:06 and we're walking towards the pool of my building
06:08 and this man is screaming, "Help, 911, somebody help me!"
06:12 And we see a man standing in the middle of the pool
06:14 with his back to us and I quickly look to see
06:17 where my daughter is because I left her sound asleep
06:20 on a lounge chair with an umbrella opened over her
06:22 and I see she's not there but my housekeeper is asleep.
06:26 So I turn back to this scene, this nightmare,
06:29 and he turns around and I see he's holding the dead body
06:33 of my little girl, I'm sorry.
06:34 I was looking at my child, completely blue.
06:38 I will never, ever forget the way her nails looked.
06:41 The tips of her nails were purple.
06:42 And I'm looking at this nightmare and I'm thinking,
06:45 my life is over.
06:46 And my husband, who has been a medic for so long,
06:49 began performing CPR.
06:50 I looked around and I saw that someone had left
06:52 a blue pashmina shawl on a lounge chair
06:55 and I picked up this shawl and I raised up my right arm
06:58 and I started screaming and sobbing a promise in Hebrew
07:02 and I promised God that for the rest of my life,
07:05 I would serve him his way, no longer my terms.
07:07 I would cover my hair, I would wear a wig,
07:10 I would dress modestly, head to toe.
07:12 The moment I wrapped my hair in this blue shawl
07:15 and I started screaming my promise to God,
07:18 my husband began to scream, I found a pulse,
07:21 I got a pulse, I got a pulse.
07:23 And eight excruciating hours later,
07:27 a visit from one hospital to another
07:30 and the doctors walked into the room and they said,
07:33 you don't understand that your daughter
07:36 is a complete miracle.
07:38 And literally, the rest is history.
07:40 We founded Ghali's Couture Wigs as a thank you to God
07:44 that I had my miracle, my salvation
07:47 by getting with the program and giving up my hair,
07:50 which was what I was meant to do.
07:51 - When I actually started liking wearing wigs,
07:55 it completely changed the narrative,
07:57 like completely changed the narrative.
07:59 And I don't think you realize, maybe you do realize,
08:01 but it really made a huge difference in all of our lives.
08:05 I mean it, I really do.
08:07 - Charlene was the first person I went to for my wig.
08:09 I came in with my cap and I would not take it off.
08:13 You had like three wigs ready for me
08:16 and I was like, okay, are we ready to take it off?
08:17 And then I was like, okay.
08:20 And I was so nervous to take the cap off.
08:22 I thought there's no way she's gonna match my hair.
08:25 - When I first opened Ghali's Couture Wigs,
08:28 I made a promise, nobody walks away from me
08:31 or my wigs unhappy.
08:33 I'm doing this for a very different reason
08:35 than everyone else in the wig industry.
08:37 And as soon as somebody walks in,
08:38 I can sense that they're a little apprehensive
08:40 or ashamed or embarrassed.
08:42 I quickly showed them, I said,
08:44 I'm wearing a wig.
08:46 Every female in this room is wearing a wig.
08:48 Welcome to Ghali's Couture Wigs.
08:50 - I'd like to think of myself and my company
08:56 as the edit and undo button for wig trauma.
09:00 Because people come in almost traumatized
09:03 and they're just, they automatically think
09:06 that they're going to have a bad experience.
09:08 And I'm like, try us.
09:10 - Yeah, it's also amazing how sometimes
09:14 my client comes in and they're like either
09:18 a little embarrassed or don't wanna show their heads.
09:21 And it's so crazy how they come in
09:24 and they get very comfortable and they leave happy.
09:27 - This girl over here just finished treatment
09:29 and she came in to cut bangs into her hand-tied custom Ghali.
09:33 - And I'm obsessed with them, they look so good.
09:35 - Amanda, you look phenomenal.
09:37 When your life is up in shambles
09:39 and you have no control of anything,
09:41 what are things you can control?
09:43 - My hair, I can control what's on my head.
09:45 And my wig was on my head and I can control that.
09:48 - That's the beauty of how you can wear the wig,
09:52 like transform into whatever else and then put it back on.
09:56 Just feel free and happy with it.
09:59 - When I lost my hair, I felt so alone and isolated
10:02 and I didn't realize that wearing a wig
10:04 made me part of a community, a sisterhood.
10:07 And I'm actually quite happy to be a part of it.
10:11 (group awing)
10:13 (gentle music)
10:16 (gentle music)
10:19 (gentle music)
10:21 (gentle music)
10:24 (gentle music)
10:26 [MUSIC]
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