“Dreaming Whilst Black” isn’t a show about hair. The second season — an A24-backed comedy based on an initial web series and Bafta-winning TV pilot — hilariously follows the trials and tribulations of aspiring London filmmaker Kwabena (played by Adjani Salmon, who also created and co-wrote the show). This time around, Kwabs nabs what he thinks is his big break: directing a major period series called “Sin and Subterfuge” that allows him to tell a story that’s both meaningful and diverse. The experience ends up exposing just how little progress there has been in the entertainment industry in terms of diversity and inclusion, and forces him to confront how much integrity he is willing to sacrifice. In the end, the show is about navigating love, family, community, and one's own morals, with a whole lot of cringe-worthy laughs aimed at highlighting white society’s often flimsy attempts at allyship along the way. 

So no, the show might not be about hair, but one can’t ignore its outsized role in the series. From Kwabena’s long, freeform locs to Amy’s sister sewing wigs in their living room, Salmon and makeup and hair designer Cynthia De La Rosa use hair to underpin some of the show’s most important themes. “So much about global-majority and Afro culture revolves around hair,” De La Rosa tells The Set Set. “It’s a thing that is used against us, but it’s also something that’s so integral to the diaspora experience. Doing your child's hair, doing your mother's hair is an act of self-care, an act of love that's built into our culture, and it’s only honest for us to see that on camera. It’s baked into the script because it’s baked into our lives.” 

You don’t even have to look closely to see what De La Rosa means. There’s Kwabena protecting his locs with his silk bonnet. Amy holding cans of TK in her hand. An extra on the set of “Sin and Subterfuge” having her hair painfully ripped through with the wrong comb by a well-meaning hairstylist. De La Rosa explains that it was important to Salmon to write those elements into the script in order to create authenticity for people watching the show. “That’s also why you see wigs and you see characters' hair change frequently, because that’s how many Black women approach hair,” she explains. “Even if you've got a stationary hairstyle like braids, you're gonna dress the braids up in a bun, you're gonna put it in a half-up half-down. You're gonna put hair accessories in your hair.” 

In addition to supporting Salmon’s vision — which also required designing dozens of period hairstyles both for the TV-series-within-a-TV-series and Kwabena’s escapes into his imagination — De La Rosa wanted to show all the different versions of Black women (and men) and how they wear their hair. “Whether they're a braided babe or they love wearing wigs, I wanted there to be a plethora of hairstyles represented on the show so that people really saw themselves.” Below, she takes us through just how she did that.   

Kwabena

Salmon kept his own freeform locs to play Kwabena, which De La Rosa either sculpted and wigged to create his period styles, or styled in various shapes depending on how his character is feeling in the real world. “You see a lot of self-expression through what we did with his locs,” explains De La Rosa. Take, for instance, when he arrives on the “Sin and Subterfuge” set for the first time with his hair tidy, small, and tied back. For a boy’s night, his locs are tied off nonchalantly to the side as if he had done it himself, while in the tense series finale his locs are all twisted up. "There's lots and lots of winding hair, and that's because internally his character feels like he’s tied in knots.” In addition to character development, it was also important for De La Rosa to demonstrate the natural style’s versatility. “I wanted to show that you can manipulate and do a lot with locs,” she explains.

Vanessa

Vanessa’s hair has gone on a journey since season one. Played by actor babirye Bukilwa, Kwabena’s love interest starts out wearing wigs to her accounting job. By the end of the first season, she’s embracing her natural texture, and by season two, she returns to London with long, intricately styled locs that De La Rosa and her team created using human hair pieces from Ruka and His and Her. “Adjani and I talked about how to incorporate hairstyles that we feel are not given enough love or that there's a negative context around,” De La Rosa explains. “Our goal was: how do we dress the hair so that audience members see that they can dress their hair and look professional?” 

De La Rosa describes Vanessa’s hairstyles in season two as romantic, which was achieved by both referencing Regency hairstyles for her modern-day looks and by manipulating the locs to create soft bends  (which she did by wrapping the locs around pipe cleaners and hitting them with a diffuser). “It’s always subliminal — we built the romance into the design of the character,” says De La Rosa. 

Amy

Amy’s 4C-textured hair also holds secrets into how her character (played by Dani Moseley) is feeling throughout the six episodes. “Amy's a character who expresses herself through the way she dresses and styles her hair, so we plotted out what her hairstyles were going to look like through the ups and downs of her storyline,” says De La Rosa. In the beginning, her hair starts out bigger, looser, and more playful but still constricted. As she starts to doubt herself and despise her job, her hair becomes smaller and her braids become tighter. By the last episode, once Amy’s nailed her dream job, we see her curls out in all their glory and beautifully accessorized with colorful beads. Similar to her work on Vanessa’s character, De La Rosa used human hair pieces from Ruka to add volume and length, Gummy Hair Styling Gel to achieve any of her sleek looks, and Hask Shampoos and Conditioner to take her styles down without aggravating her scalp.

Bridgette

De La Rosa intentionally covered actress Christine Adams' textured hair with a sleek bobbed wig for her role as acclaimed film producer Bridgette Julienne. “Women like Bridgette who work in predominantly white industries tend to understand who their audience is,” explains De La Rosa. Also, from her costumes to her makeup, Bridgette is an expensive character.  “It needed to feel like she either has her wigs made by the same woman as Serena Williams, or gets her hair blow-dried by Charlotte Mensah in West London.” The silk-pressed, inverted bob gave off just the right vibes.  

Adjoa

For actress and Kwabena’s almost new love interest, De La Rosa chose to show that naturally-textured hair can be extra long and look beautiful. “We almost always see Black women with short [natural] hair; when it’s long it’s always blown out and straight. But there are people out there with really long, healthy 4A, 4B, 4C hair — we just don't see it [on screen].” De La Rosa and her team made actress Simona Brown the extra-long wig and purposely gave it a kinky-straight texture so it looked soft and ethereal. “After reading the character, my pitch to the directors was that her character feels kind of like a hippie, and her hair should match that aesthetic.” 

Funmi

In contrast to Adjoa, Rachel Adeduji’s character Funmi is on the opposite side of the hair-length spectrum. For season two, De La Rosa shaved her hair down, bleached it, and dyed it a playful shade of pink. “Right now, we’re seeing a lot of Black women with completely shaved heads or with short, ‘90s-esque styles, and it just felt like Funmi’s character, who is fun and sexy, would experiment with that and pull it off.” 

Grace 

Kwabena’s mom Grace (Jo Martin) also wears her hair in locs, and in season two — as she embarks on a new romantic relationship — she begins putting more effort into her looks. “We see her character wearing a bit more makeup when Errol is around, and then you see her tying her hair up a little bit more, to the point Kwabena notices as well,” says De La Rosa. What was just as important, however, was that the same attention to detail was given to Grace’s hair as to the younger actors. “I think it's very easy for people working with women who are a bit older to just not do anything. I did not want to do that.” 

Maurice

De La Rosa ensured there were two textured-hair barbers on her team so that all of the men on the show — even the ones with close crops — felt good when they were  in front of the camera. “I think a lot of Black men, especially on sets, are not given the care they need,” says De La Rosa, who notes that oftentimes when working with Black male actors, they send references to their personal barbers, some of whom they’ve been going to since childhood. “Not only was it really important to me that every single actor had a visual identity that worked with their character, but it was also that they were taken care of behind the scenes by people who were very, very experienced.” 

"Dreaming Whilst Black" series 2 is available now on BBC iPlayer.