The day season four of the Netflix series Stranger Things came out, I was unable to watch (aka binge) right away because of plans I’d made long before I knew the release date. Another friend who loves the show instagrammed about it, and I found myself replying the following, with an urgency that surprised me:

“I just need to know… how is the hair this season??”

That’s when I realized I’d never looked forward to hair on a show the way I did with Stranger Things. That’s when I knew I needed to know more.

I had an inkling there was something special here, perhaps someone special: a storyteller behind the perms and buzz cuts and mullets.

Her name is Sarah Hindsgaul. And I am not the only one who’s been taken with her craft. When I first began to research who was behind the Stranger Things hairstyles, I found more press than I’d ever seen for hair on a singular show—Vogue, GQ, The Hollywood Reporter, and Vanity Fair all covered the now-iconic hairstyles Sarah created.

But what I couldn’t find more about was Sarah. Who was this woman telling stories with hair? And how did she get so good at making people feel something with her work?

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Before I meet Sarah across a Zoom screen I think, Why didn’t I do my hair today? But I relax when I see Sarah’s wild blonde hair sitting just above her shoulders, unfussy and natural. She wears a loose top with flowy sleeves, reminding me of the dresses in the behind-the-scenes photos and videos she shares on Instagram: gorgeous almost-period-but-definitely-modern long dresses with statement sleeves, paired with sneakers and big pink bows in her hair.

Sarah starts by telling me what it was like growing up in Copenhagen, Denmark, and all about the theater school for kids she attended and loved and where she quickly realized she didn’t want to be on stage. Her favorite part of a production was the character development, especially how a character’s look could help tell a story and say something about who they were,  what they wanted,  and where they were going.

From a young age Sarah was consumed with questions about people: how we become who we are, and how we use hair and clothes to share that with the world. She first considered going to college for psychology. But her love of movies led her in another direction. The movie Pulp Fiction, to be precise.

Sarah cut her hair just like Uma Thurman’s from the movie, and a dream sparked—one that kept her up at night. She dreamed of telling stories with hair and working on “really big movies in America.”

Sarah was intensely driven, and didn’t stop to question her dream or its possibility. She just started running towards it. After high school, she went to school for hair in Denmark for four years, apprenticing under the best hairstylist she could find (she looked her up in magazines), spending hours snipping scissors just at the tips to create perfect edges on a bob and angling her wrist and brush just so to make an “Elvis” blow-out.

For four years Sarah went to school by day and did hair for photoshoots by night. “I was so scared of getting behind,” she says of those non-stop days. “If I had a day where I didn’t do anything, I was scared I was not going to get to live out my dreams.”

After finishing school she continued to work on any editorial work in Denmark she could get. Most were gigs in the fantasy genre where her job was to give models stiff, high renaissance hair nesting fake birds. Oh, and there was a lot of glitter. “You know, the nineties,” Sarah says. “It was crazy and super fun. But at a certain point I just was like, I want to stay with some of these characters.”

Once the hair was sprayed and photos taken, it was over, and Sarah wanted more. More time, more movement, more grit and less glitter.

A few months out of school, Sarah decided to move to New York City.

All Sarah could say in English at that time was “bagel” and “cream cheese,” so with her portfolio in one hand and a bagel in the other, she pursued her dream in New York City “I walked around with my little book,” she says, “and I showed it to anybody willing to see it.”

Her hopes were high. She had a portfolio, years of expert training, and had taken a big risk for her dream. It was all happening.

“But in the end it didn’t work out,” she says. “Nobody wanted me. I was devastated. So I started shampooing hair in a salon. They didn’t even want me on the floor because my English was so bad.”

Sarah was also in charge of mopping the floors. It wasn’t what she’d come all the way to New York City to do. She was disappointed, but not deterred. “I think you have to be willing to mop floors at points in your life or you don’t get anywhere,” she says. “Nobody’s going to give anything to you.” She says this kindly, with zero bitterness, as if the realization no one is going to just give you your dream is its own kind of freedom and relief, a reminder that when things get low it doesn’t mean you did something wrong.

Sarah recalls the mopping-floor days with hope and possibility, a mentality that kept her going when it might have seemed, at least from the outside, that her dreams were dying.

But while Sarah was rejected from what seemed like all of New York City, she held on to the few kind “no’s” she received, like the people who complimented her portfolio and told her she had potential and encouraged her to keep working on her craft.

Sarah still believed she could do this and that she had talent. Her first rejections didn’t make her think her dream was delusional. They simply taught her it was going to take longer than she thought. It also showed her how much this really meant to her; she was willing to go the distance.

Sarah still struggled to sleep sometimes; her dream would keep her awake. It was that phase when hopeful dreaming turns into a kind of uncomfortable longing. When you’re far enough from where you started that the initial spark has faded from view, but the glimmer at the end is still so small that on the worst of nights it doesn’t feel like a beacon of hope but a reality check. The distance still to go is no longer a mystery. And now you’re weary. So some nights you can’t sleep. You wish you were already there. You wonder if it will always feel just out of reach.

Sarah returned to the work in the morning. She tried to forget the evening stress and tried to focus instead on the fun she could have in what she was doing that day. No matter how far her dream felt, she never stopped feeling enamored with whatever hair projects were right in front of her, like the volunteer work she started doing for NYU student films she found on Craigslist. She could always seem to find the spark again in even the smallest version of the kind of work she loved.

The ideas also almost never stopped coming either, especially when she’d watch TV or go to the movies and see the hairstyles and think, “I could do that better.” She laughs. “For many years,” Sarah says, “I had ideas about what I wanted to do, and I felt like I could do it; but I wasn’t actually good enough to do it. So there was a lot of falling. There were a lot of bloody knees.”

Sarah had been trained well and had meaningful experience; it wasn’t that she was bad. It’s just that, as she says, “it takes years to master something. It’s like watching a baby when they start walking. They just hit the ground and keep getting up. That’s what it felt like. I just kept getting up and was like, I can do this.”

She doesn’t quite know where that optimism came from, but she was so excited by the work she was doing that she even “found it fun even to fail…” She pauses,  then adds, “sometimes.” We laugh.

Sarah quickly became the go-to hair stylist for an NYU film school class, doing hair on almost all their films for three years. “It was awesome because we were learning together,” she says. “You don’t want to go too high too fast. It comes back to scrubbing floors, right? You definitely want to do your steps.”

She also loved the safe, warm environment that came alongside creating with friends who were just as driven. Sarah became such a fixture that when that class of film students graduated NYU they gave her a graduation cap.

And later, when those students started making projects in TV and film, they hired Sarah.

She spent the next decade working on anything that would hire her, mostly short films and a few episodes of TV, learning on the job and loving every second of it.

Her big dream, though, was to do period hair: to shape someone’s look in a way that told their story and transported the viewer to another time and place.

She’d had that dream ever since she did a period piece for an NYU film. Eventually, she got a job with the HBO miniseries set in the 1980’s called Show Me a Hero.

Then, she got called in to interview for a new period drama with HBO about the music scene in New York in the 1970’s, with names like Scorsese and Mick Jagger attached. By this point she’d been doing period hair in the industry for years, and while she felt ready, she didn’t think she’d get the job. There were so many others who had decades on her. And for such a big show, she knew they’d go with someone who had more experience than she did.

But they kept calling her back. Months went by, and she learned she was one of the final two people they were considering to be the head of the hair department. Sarah was in awe to even be considered with the other artist, someone she admired. The HBO creative team kept going back and forth between the two. But in the end, they hired the artist with more experience.

“I cried about it for about a month,” she says. Sarah understood the choice, and tells me many times how brilliant the person they went with is, but she was completely devastated.  It’s the first time in the interview that she doesn’t smile while recounting a failure, the first time it seems like a setback truly gutted her, as if the optimism she’d been running on at the time had finally run out.

Then Sarah got a call from a good friend she’d met on the set of Show Me a Hero: Winona Ryder.

Winona had recently been given what’s called a lookbook that Matt and Ross Duffer created to pitch networks on Stranger Things, a TV series set in Indiana in the 80’s featuring kids and monsters and mysteries. Winona knew from working with Sarah on Show Me A Hero that her period work was good. She also knew Sarah was heartbroken, and said, “Hey, this isn’t going to be big like the HBO thing, but at least it’s a period show; maybe you can come and do this with me?”

Winona showed Sarah the lookbook, and as Sarah describes it, it was fun, and “very much alive.” She was so sad then that “fun” sounded like just what she needed next.

She got the job and moved to Atlanta for six months to work on the first season of Stranger Things. She cried for the first two weeks, still grieving the big-budget high-profile show she almost got but didn’t. But as it turned out, the HBO show got canceled after its first season. Stranger Things is now in its fourth season, with a fifth and final season in the works.

The hair so many have fallen in love with (like myself) over the last six years is the product of a highly collaborative process, involving a team Sarah adores and talks about constantly, all who are seemingly as obsessed with storytelling as she is. Each hairstyle begins with words.

“When I first get a script,” Sarah says, “I go through every single character, looking for their arc. Where are they going? What are they going to go through? Who are they as people? What’s their emotional process?” Before she gathers visual inspiration for a character’s debut look,  she asks herself one question: “What do I want people to think about who this character is when they see them for the first time?”

Sarah is careful that a look doesn’t reveal too much too soon, using subtlety and contrast to enhance a storyline or a surprise. Like for the the kind orderly who (spoiler alert) becomes the big bad villain Vecna, Sarah chose his hair to have a soft, cherub-like look, inspired by cupid.

Sarah also sees the actors as co-creators of the final look, taking in their feedback and looking to their reactions to decide when the look is ready.

It takes a lot of experimenting to get to what we see on screen, like the six tries to get Eddie Munson’s mullet just right; you can see one such screen test on her Instagram, which to-date has over a million views. She mentions in the post that what ended up on screen was different than where they started, and that Rob Pickens, the brilliant wig maker, and Joe, the actor who plays Eddie, were essential in getting to the final (and in my opinion, iconic) look.

But how does she know when to stop experimenting? How does she know when it’s ready? “You know when the actor puts it on and lights up,” she says. “You can feel it.”

Which is why Sarah puts a lot of effort into creating a warm working environment, like the one she found at NYU where everyone felt safe to share their opinions. “The most important thing is an actor feeling comfortable to speak up,” she says, “because if they don’t feel the hair is helping them become the character then it doesn’t matter.”

One of Sarah’s biggest career challenges came in season four, when the script called for the character Eleven, who by season four has long, wavy, chestnut hair, to have a shaved head again, just like she did in season one. But this time, the actor Millie Bobby Brown had other project commitments in addition to Stranger Things, which meant shaving her head wasn’t possible. But getting a wig to look realistic with such a short cut requires a very time-consuming technique that costs $10,000 a day and only lasts for one application. They had 85 shooting days to cover.

That kind of wig option also required a four-hour daily application, and Millie was still considered a child actor at the time, so her time on set was limited. They didn’t have enough time or money for a shaved head wig. They decided to settle for pulling her long chestnut wig into a ponytail.

But when Sarah had first read the script, the shaved head was the detail that made her cry.  “They take everything away from her, everything,” she says of what that moment in the script represented to her. “She starts back to zero again, all the way back to scratch. We did a lot of shaving of people’s heads when we shot in Lithuania. Shaving heads is a very sensitive thing. It’s almost like asking people to get naked, it almost strips you from who you are. Eleven worked so hard on creating her identity, right? We’d had her in seven different looks up to this point. And she’s still trying to find herself. And then they just take it, rip it away from her while she’s sleeping.” Sarah almost cries again as she talks about it, as if Eleven is a real person. Because, for her, she kind of is.

The shaved head was visually essential for Sarah; she wanted to make people feel the way she felt when she read the script.

Matt and Ross, otherwise known as The Duffer Brothers and the show’s creators, also believed deeply in what the shaved head represented for the story. But since they couldn’t afford the proven options, they were hesitant to try something that had never been done before, knowing how vicious the internet can be, how one wrong move—like a bad wig—could erase everything that had come before. It’s one of every artist’s worst fears—that their art becomes a joke.

Sarah of course didn’t want that either, but what seemed truly impossible to everyone else didn’t seem impossible to Sarah. “I was like, I just think I can maybe do it,” she says of trying to find another way to achieve a shaved-head look without actually shaving or spending $10,000 a day. She had an idea.

By this point, Sarah had been working in hair for 20 years, always learning and always absorbing new ideas and tricks; she’d even worked as the New York location department head on the movie Marriage Story just for the learning experience. She also often sends cold emails to other hair department heads she admires, like Cassie Russek who’s currently working on the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie. They’ve become friends and frequently share with each other what they’re learning on the job.

Sarah went into Matt and Ross’s trailer almost every morning, “driving them nuts,” she laughs, bringing them her ideas for how she could still keep the shaved head in the story.

And because they’re storytellers too, they wanted her to be right. They’d created the same environment Sarah creates in her chair, wanting everyone to feel comfortable enough to share feedback, ideas, and opinions, where ego and reputation take a back seat to story. Even though they were nervous about still trying for a shaved head, they never told Sarah to stop bringing her ideas.

She was given a budget of $10,000 to try one of her ideas. Matt and Ross gave her only one condition: “If we can see even 5% that it looks like a wig, it’s out.”

Sarah knew she was putting her own career and reputation on the line too.

She had to contend with the real possibility that if this did get to screen but didn’t actually work and instead caused an internet meme storm, maybe she would never work again. But she couldn’t shake the other thought: “What if it does work? What would it mean for the story?”

In the end, she came back to the bleeding knees she references often. She’d fallen so much in the past that she wasn’t really that afraid anymore. “If I fall, I fall, but it’s worth it,” she says. “And I’ve learned if you feel something is really important you shouldn’t give in; you should keep going, give it your best. No matter what happened, at least I could say I gave it everything I had.”

Her 20+ years of experience went into that wig. And when it aired on season four, episode five, it was one of the most Googled things that day. Because people were googling to find out if Millie Bobby Brown had really shaved her head.

Sarah was pregnant during most of the work she did for season four (that baby’s godmothers are Winona and Millie), and has always been intentional about creating a working environment where women can thrive. “I don’t think you should have to choose between your dream or being a mother,” she says. “You can have both, and there are many different ways of parenting. Men travel all the time.” She’s a big believer that women should, like men, be able to parent in different ways and not be judged for it, and that an industry initially designed for men also needs to change to accommodate and honor the talented mothers bringing our favorite stories to life. When it comes to the hair department she leads, she’s created a team that allows for people to cover for others when they need to take care of their kids or other family things. “You’ve got to be able to be alive at the same time as work,” she says, “and being a human makes you more creative. How can you understand people if you’re not living? You’re telling human stories. That’s why we all love a lot of these projects, because they are so close to that feeling.”

Sarah has two kids in college in New York and one six-month old with her now in her house in LA where she’s Zooming in from. She shows me the window to the right where you can see the Griffith Observatory in the distance, and mentions that she’s sitting in her closet right now, which houses her wig collection. I ask if she can tilt the camera to show me some of her wigs. But she can’t. Because a few weeks ago, she’d looked out that same window and saw a California wildfire. In survival mode, she grabbed exactly three things and ran out the door to her car: Her baby, her dog, and her wigs.

Thankfully, the fire didn’t reach her house. But the wigs, she tells me, are still in the trunk of her car, including the blonde wig Eleven wears over her real shaved head in season one.

In season three, part of Sarah’s job included designing the hair for new character (Robin) played by actor Maya Hawke, who also happens to be Uma Thurman’s daughter: Uma who wore the original Pulp Fiction hairstyle that inspired Sarah all those years ago in Denmark.

To date, Sarah has been nominated for two Emmy awards in the hair styling categories. But when I ask her about her biggest dream come true moment, she says it was the moment she put her experimental shaved-head wig on Millie for the first time and saw her light up.