Every time I take a picture, I notice something else that needs changing to reach the femme look I’m going for. With the rainbows clothes and rainbow hair, I thought I was ready to move on, but when I bought a more normie dress, I realized that I needed something a bit more muted to go with it. And thus began my adventure into buying wigs.
The key thing about buying wigs is that unlike most things I’ve purchased, this is a case where I’m not sure that I have the right thing at this point. I’ve tried a handful of them, but I’m definitely still leaning heavily towards the low cost wigs, and the result is that I’m not sure how much of the wig behavior is what I should be expecting vs. anything else.
I went with three basic looks to mix in with my clothing choices:
- A shaggy long blonde wig
- A long side-part fringe wig, colormixed dark brown to light brown at the bottom
- A long middle-part side wig, color mixed from blonde to light brown.
These were all bought from Rosegal, another cheap Chinese seller. In general, for cheap Chinese sellers, you can expect long delivery times and occasional missed shipments. Rosegal in particular appears to have a somewhat notorious reputation for these things – but in this case I didn’t have any particular problems with this part of the process. (I definitely recommend being wary of spending any significant amount of money on a single item from a low-budget Chinese retailer: the loss rates of objects you buy from them are just too high to make the risk worth it.)
Two of these arrived quickly; the third took longer to arrive.
The overall effect of wearing femme clothes combined with a wig is definitely way better than previously. With very short hair, I can get away with a sort of “cropped” look – at least at some angles – but mostly found that any picture of me in a dress with my ‘normal’ hair felt gross. When shooting pictures, I would tend to simply crop my head out of the frame entirely to avoid the somewhat disconcerting look of my masculine balding head with a dress.
Each of the different colors I got works well in different situations. The darker brown look pairs well with the gothy dress; while the blonde works out well when I’ve got a very “white” lighting setup, or with the patterned black and white dress I also have.
With wigs, I definitely felt more comfortable, especially when wearing makeup. I no longer had to have a very specific angle before I felt comfortable with the look – instead, I could enjoy shots from a wide variety of angles, without feeling an ‘uncanny valley’ of the cross between femme and masculine.
Because I have short hair, I didn’t have the struggle of hiding hair as much as someone with longer hair to begin with might have – no need for fancy wig nets or complicated ways of hiding existing hair. On the other hand, with no experience with long hair, I’m a bit at a loss as to how to make wigs “look good” – putting one on is one thing, but if I don’t want to look like a blonde Einstein, with hair flying in every direction, it takes me a long time to actually get things oriented in the correct direction.
I also have a lot of trouble with wig care: while in theory, I know how to take care of wigs, in practice, for these low-cost synethic wigs, it’s unclear how much use I should expect to be able to get out of them. At least one of the wigs is already showing significant fraying in the ends, and I should probably do more to try to clean it up / brush it out.
So, on the wig adventure, overall, my feelings are:
- They are extremely important to me in presenting a consistent femme image. Makes a huge difference in how comfortable I feel sharing photos.
- Rosegal was cheap, and though not speedy, was perfectly effective in getting my items to me.
- The quality is approximately what you’d expect from cheap good: that is, it’s fine, but long term, I don’t think these wigs would be good for someone regularly using them.
Really, mostly what writing this post makes me want to do is go try on the wigs I have and get better pictures with them. Looking back on the photos I did take, I really enjoy them, and want to have more. Most of this is probably the fact that wigs gave me the first really “complete” profile shots in a non-flamboyant femme look: I finally had the dress, the makeup, and the wig, and I could pull off the “girl” look okay.
Of course, profile shots are one thing, but there’s a whole other level for the full body shot. And to deal with that, we’re gonna have to deal with an area that I’m still struggling with: my legs. But that’s a story for another post.