“Queen Charlotte is the only person in a Regency period wearing her Georgian wig. It’s never moved. This for us, was the story of how that happened.”
When Queen Charlotte star Golda Rosheuvel first met with the show’s hair and makeup team, she cried. Not because the actor, who plays the elder, Regency-era version of the titular royal on the hit Bridgerton prequel, had concerns about the level of craftsmanship or the treatment of her natural hair. It was because she felt seen.
“I remember…being really, really shocked, actually, that they wanted to just tease my own hair out and have that as the front line of the wig,” the actor said during a panel at the show’s premiere. “Those words and that kind of discussion, of showing my own natural hair within a character’s look, had never, ever been discussed with me. So I got so emotional and I cried because it was such a moment of ‘I’m being seen not only as an actress, as a person of color, but this character is being seen through these ideas—hair and makeup and costume, and how the show looks.’”
For Nic Collins, the Netflix series’ hair and makeup head, the most important thing from the beginning—from the moment she took the project on—was ensuring that textured hair was truly and thoughtfully represented. “The initial conversations were about giving a true representation in the Queen Charlotte world, under the Bridgerverse, as they call it,” she tells Glamour. “And the period is perfect for it. I never felt like we were going too far from it.”
As it turns out, wigs in the Georgian period, when Young Charlotte’s story takes place, were actually textured—but then again, Bridgerton has never worried itself about being historically accurate. More important for Collins was that the hair worked for the story, the characters, and the actors portraying them. So they matched “loads” of different hair colors for Rosheuvel’s Queen Charlotte with her skin tone and showed her the design process for the wigs’ shapes and textures. “She just loved them,” Collins says. “And the more she loved it, the more we wanted to give it.”
Collins brought a similar approach to India Amarteifio, who plays the Young Queen Charlotte. The actor wears wigs throughout the series, but all were created to be a replication of her own natural hair. “It all just fell into place in talking with both of them,” Collins says. “It just felt really natural to go down that route, and it felt real to us. It felt like we were creating a journey, a story to be told through the hair.” Learn more about that journey, below.
All of Young Queen Charlotte’s wigs match India Amarteifio’s natural hair color.
Says Collins, “I think the first conversation India and I had was, ‘Okay, so we know Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton. Is that the Queen Charlotte that we want to represent? Is that how we see her?’”
The answer to both questions? No. Instead, they wanted to tell her story—of a young woman coming to a strange country, where people didn’t look like her—through her hair. “We decided we would never go into any other color but her natural hair color in this season,” Collins says. “We always knew that we were never going to go beyond that, so we would never go into the realm of Regency Queen Charlotte. We would always keep her with natural, textured hair.”
As the series continues, Young Charlotte’s wigs grow in size—a nod to their eventual path come Bridgerton proper—while always keeping her natural hair as the base. “Hers is an emotional story, and we always wanted that to be the biggest part for her,” Collins says. “If we’d have chosen to put big colorful wigs on her from the start, it wouldn’t have had the same journey.”
There’s a moving story behind the “bow wig.”
In episode two, Regency Queen Charlotte is seen wearing a wig with an elaborate series of bows. Turns out, that is a nod to season one of Bridgerton and the work of Marc Pilcher, an Emmy-winning hair and makeup artist who died in 2021 from complications from the COVID-19 virus.
“On Bridgerton season one, Mark did a white wig that had some bows and diamonds in it, and that was my favorite wig of all the wigs. It was beautiful work. So I decided to create a wig as an ode to him. We created a wig just out of bows as my nod to him and to Bridgerton season one.”
The inspiration for the hair came from surprising places.
“We looked at a lot of period movies, but they’d been represented more traditionally than what we wanted to do,” Collins says. “So I ended up actually looking a lot at fabric patterns, how you can achieve that detail with fabric, and then trying to replicate that with hair. The inspiration was also drawn from catwalks. I had mood boards. Inspiration can come from anywhere.”
