Peter Owen has been making wigs   since the 1980s. He has made wigs for the stars of more than seventy movies, including Tom Hanks inPhiladelphia, Johnny Depp in Sleepy Hollow, and Nicole Kidman in The Others. One of his biggest jobs so far has been designing the hair and make-up  for the three Lord of the Rings movies. He had just six weeks to design and make more than a hundred wigs, each one a different style, colour, shape and length. The hair and make-up in a movie are just as important as the costumes  or the sets. Over the years, Peter has made actors look older, younger, healthy and sick. For one movie he even made a female actor look like a man!"What people don't realize about wigs is that we are not always making people more beautiful," he says. "Often we are covering up beauty and making them look ordinary." All Peter's wigs are hand-made using human hair, so they look as real as possible. This also makes them very expensive--between US$4,500 and US$12,500 each! He knows he's done a good job when people don't realize the star of the movie is wearing a wig. So he was pleased when one newspaper said that Nicole Kidman had dyed  her hair dark brown for a movie. "It was a wig and no one knew that," he says. What special feature about wigs does Peter mention?
They can make people more beautiful. They can change people's hair styles. They can cover up beauty and make people look ordinary. They can make people look younger.