How we Developed our Book-Accurate Violet Sorrengail Wig

We’ve had several requests for a wig with a lower ombre and we also wanted to make the wig longer than it already was. In Fourth Wing, Violet describes her hair as a “long braid” where “just above my shoulders (...) the brown strands start to lose their warmth of color and slowly fade to a steely, metallic silver by the ends.” We aimed to replicate this style exactly.

The first sample we received wasn’t exactly what we were hoping for! The ombre was still quite high, and the color change was too severe. We sent back our notes to our manufacturer for a subtler color fade from top to bottom. 

We were super pleased with this wig and carried it in our shop for months. Our customers were very happy with this wig as well, but we did hear some complaints from fans of the books about the lack of silver bangs and the silver underlayer from time to time.

Back to the drawing board! We decided to remove the silver under layer of the wig. Although the previous design would suffice for a hair-down look since only the top layer would be visible, the silver poked out at the sides when braided. This new wig had a brunette to silver transition throughout the entire wig. 

However, for our first attempt at the silver bangs, the color transition started too high which made them mostly silver. They looked too artificial and it cheapened the look of the wig. What’s more, when braided, a silver streak would show on one side of the wig but not the other. 

When constructing the wig, it’s extremely difficult to make every unit perfectly symmetrical. There will be slightly more bang on the left or right by a couple of millimeters, which means that some silver will only show on one side of the head when braided. We experimented with dying the excess silver to brown with Rit synthetic fiber dye so that we would have perfectly symmetrical silver streaks on both sides, but the bangs in the front ended up looking too skinny. Plus, the process would be too cumbersome to do for every Sorrengail wig we braided. We made the deliberate choice to aim for symmetry and hide the silver streak in the braids instead of trying to put silver on both sides of the head as they would always appear uneven if visible. By doing so, we were able to mimic Violet's signature look in a way that looks intentional and sleek and found that this "less is more" approach actually matches the character's aesthetic much better.