PARTWAY INTO THE second episode of I May Destroy You, Arabella (played by writer and codirector Michaela Coel) acquiesces to a nap. She's sorting through shards of memory— what she will later realize was a drug-facilitated sexual assault in a London bar— but for now, her friend Terry (Weruche Opia) is tucking her into bed. "Where's your headscarf?" Terry asks, fishing in the nightstand drawer for it. It's an everyday gesture made visible—an example of how I May Destroy You speaks volumes in subtle details. As the show's makeup and hair designer Bethany Swan explains, "If you've spent the time to glue your wig down and do your edges, your best friend is not going to let you go to sleep and mess it up and put your hard work to waste."

Coel's 12-episode HBO-BBC series is a story about many things: trauma, consent, the alchemy of the creative process. Throughout, hair is an essential element of that narrative arc. At first, "the only cue within the script was pink hair," Swan recalls of Arabella's defining look from episode one. "The color was sort of the catalyst for everything." Coel's hair was newly shorn at the time of filming, so the solution was a wig: shoulder-length in a shade of bubble gum with dark roots. "She's sort of stuck in a rut with her writing, and the color itself is a bit more washed out," Swan says. "She's at a crossroads, really."

8081 View article pages

The correlation between Arabella's spin-cycle moods and hair developed from there. In energetic flashback scenes set in Italy, her hair is a blunt-cut electric purple. "When you think of that color, it's vivid, it's confident, it's in your face," says Swan. In another episode, Arabella leans into her Instagram swagger with long glossy black hair; later, in an imagined encounter with her rapist, she whips a platinum pixie out of her bag.

"Wigs have been part of film and TV for years, but it was wonderful to be able to use them to be seen and to be obvious and to be worn as people would wear in real life," says Swan. The show's wigs can convey a sense of heaviness (Terry finds herself dismissed from an audition for wearing one) but also a release. In a salon scene in episode five, the stylist slips off Arabella's pink hair, revealing cornrows underneath—itself another wig, braided and finessed. That sleight of hand sets up the big reveal in the following scene: Arabella's shaved head as a means of tender catharsis.

"It's the power of taking away," says Swan, with a word of appreciation for "knowing when enough is enough."