Head Wrapping Team Hosts Baltimore Event
Baltimore-based Wrapunzel, a company and website offering help and instruction on head wrapping, hosted its first Baltimore event earlier this month.
The event featured scarves for purchase in addition to tools and techniques to help women get creative with their head coverings.
“There’s an art to it and a science to it,” said Rivka Malka Perlman, one quarter of the four-person team behind Wrapunzel. She, along with husband Bezalel and partners Andrea and Yonatan Grinberg, started operating the company in January. Both women had spent years prior to Wrapunzel making and posting head wrapping tutorials.
An adherent of traditional Jewish customs mandating the covering of a married woman’s hair but not a fan of wigs, Perlman had always admired the way Israeli women were able to wrap their hair in big, colorful updos. “I would just experiment all the time,” she said. The secret, she learned, was using more than one scarf. On any given day Perlman said her head wrap can include as few as two or as many five scarves wound and tied together.
Though Perlman and Andrea Grinberg began their tutorials as a resource for other Jewish women, head wrapping, Perlman said, has brought them together with women from all different walks of life. The first head wrapping expo the pair attended together was a largely Muslim event.
“I feel like when a woman wears a scarf, there’s something very relatable about her,” said Perlman. “It’s just like the light shines out of her face.”
Since both women are residents of the Baltimore area, their local event was a little more low-key than some of the other expos they’ve participated in. It’s fun just to see the confidence a colorful wrap gives a woman, said Perlman.
After all, she said, “We’re not here to sell, we’re here to share.”