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 older, Regency-era version of the titular royal on the hit Bridgerton prequel, has concerns about the level of craftsmanship or the treatment of her natural hair. It was because she felt saw.

“I remember … I was really, really shocked, actually, that they just wanted to tease my own hair and have it 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, to show my own natural hair within a character’s look, had never been discussed with me. So, I got so emotional and I cried because it was such a moment where I’m not only seen as an actress, as a person of color, but this character is seen through these ideas—hair and makeup and costumes, and what the show looks like.”

For Nic Collins, the Netflix series’ head of hair and make-up, the most important thing from the start – from the moment she took on the project – was to ensure that textured hair was represented realistically and thoughtfully. “The initial discussions were about giving a real representation in the Queen Charlotte world, under the Bridgerverse as they call it,” she says. Glamour. And the time period is perfect for it. I never felt like we were going too far away from that.”

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 concerned himself with being historically accurate. More important to 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 liked 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 are created to be a replication of her own natural hair. “It all fell into place just by talking to both of them,” says Collins. “It just felt very 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 the young Queen Charlotte’s wigs match India Amarteifio’s natural hair color.

Collins says: “I think the first conversation India and I had was, ‘Okay, so we know Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton. Is it the Queen Charlotte we want to represent? Is that how we see her?’”