A woman’s hair is her crowning glory — a truth no one knows more than custom wig designer and artist, Hadiiya Barbel. In fact the 33-year-old business woman calls her creations “crowns,” citing their ability to make a woman feel like royalty.
“I create transformative beauty,” Barbel says. “It’s the healing arts for many women.”
After years of creating and styling the detachable manes of celebrities such as daytime talk show host (and former boss) Wendy Williams, actress Angela Bassett, and singer Ashanti, the clients that Barbel is overjoyed to work with are those who stand to benefit the most from this “healing art”: women suffering hair loss from chemo, lupus, alopecia, or any number of health issues. She acts as a high priestess of self-esteem for what she calls “the new celebrity.”
“You know who she is?” she asks, barely able to contain her excitement. “[She is] the woman who has to balance the careers, the woman who loses [her] hair and [is] suffering to find [her] self-esteem again. She just found out that she has breast cancer and her hair is falling down in the shower as she’s washing her hair. But she still has to work, she still has to find a way to pull it together; she has to manage her family and she still has to believe in herself. That’s the new celebrity to me, not because what show she’s on or what gossip she’s talking about. It’s her ability to persevere.’
And Barbel knows from perseverance — she is a completely self-made woman juggling not only the rigors of managing a booming brand, but of single motherhood as well. She and her former husband started their family early, when Barbel was 20, “so I [could] grow with them,” she says. First-born Nawa, 13, was followed by Ahshar, 11, and Savannah, 6.
After years of nonstop work, Barbel’s devotion to her children and her own growth led her leave her plum — but hectic — position as Wendy Williams’s stylist in 2010, after winning a daytime Emmy for hairstyling. Now she’s moving on to the next chapter of her business, Hadiiya Barbel Collections.
“The work is no longer just styling people’s hair,” she says in awe. “Now it’s about bringing women together so we can feel good. Now people are coming and I shake their hands — ‘Hi, I’m Hadiiya Barbel’ — and they don’t let go.”
How do you feel about the way that your crowns make people feel?
It just shifts energy. You might have natural [hair], you might have a bald head because of alopecia or chemotherapy, you might be a Jewish woman, you might be a video vixen, you might be a career woman on the go, you might not have the time [to style your own hair]. You may not want to relax your hair, you may want to be Nicki Minaj for a day. You may want to look like Beyonce all the time. I don’t care whatever the reason is. You might want to try a new haircut, but you don’t want to compromise your own hair. It totally changes the persona of the person. It makes you feel like a rockstar! It makes you feel awesome. Why? Because you can do anything you want. It’s about happiness.
