There’s something about love at first sight that makes for a perfect romance. My romance began down the road from my house on the streets of Khayelitsha. I was 13 years old when I walked into this specific salon and my life changed forever. There they were! The most perfect braids I’d ever seen. This was the day that I fell in love with hair. I was immediately drawn in and wanted to enquire more about this art. I wanted to learn and soon discovered that the hairstylist was hard of hearing. We could not communicate verbally, but I would sit day in day out watching her doing hair. No words exchanged but a special language shared between student and master that we both understood. It was in those moments that I learnt that hair is a language and expression of its own. I knew there and then that I would carry this passion with me forever.

The hair romance continued in my adult life. I was not the little girl who was only fascinated by braids anymore. I started experimenting with wigs and it opened a whole new other world. In Varsity, I always did my own hair because I was never satisfied by how other people did it. And so, one day I thought to myself that I should share this love with others. That is how my baby  “Hair By Viwe” was born. Initially it was washing wigs and later evolved to selling hair.