My Bizarre Reign as New York’s King of “Virgin Russian Hair”

Complete strangers wiring me $15k on the spot, smuggling blond ponytails across the Atlantic, secret rendezvous under the overpass — I just may have had the weirdest side hustle of all time.

Illustrations by Ryan Raphael | Edited by Brendan Spiegel

I never aspired to become a player in New York’s exclusive and incestuous world of “Russian hair” wigs and extensions, where long silky blond tresses sourced from the scalps of young Slavic women are “hairy gold” for a certain segment of the city’s beautiful people. I always thought I was destined for more highbrow pursuits, having graduated from Columbia University, then built a journalism career in Eastern Europe, for a time as editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Playboy, then eventually editing and publishing a successful fashion magazine, B.East, for almost a decade. But when the magazine collapsed during the financial crisis of 2010, I was penniless and stuck in Kyiv, the crumbling capital of Ukraine, where I had moved at the urging of a local oligarch whose big promises about investment and rebranding turned out to be as empty as the bankrupt nation’s finances. I was single and pushing 40. The resulting midlife crisi…