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Viola Davis is sharing how she became dependent on wigs and why her natural hair moment at the Oscars was such a huge deal for her.

When the “How To Get Away With Murder” star rocked some twists to the 2012, naturalistas cheered! What no one realized was that this was a big personal victory for Viola, who was once shocked into the world of wigs when she suddenly developed Alopecia areata at age of 28.

“I woke up one day and it looked like I had a Mohawk. Big splash of bald on the top of my head,” she told Vulture magazine. The actress had no clue what had happened to Hey scalp at first, but the condition was actually emotionally triggered. “I found out it was stress related. That’s how I internalized it. I don’t do that anymore.”

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Losing half of her hair was really hard on her self-esteem back then, and she “spent so much of my life not feeling comfortable in [her] skin.” Like many women with alopecia, she began wearing wigs to cover up her hair loss. Soon, she refused to be seen without one on, and she had a hair piece for just about every different scenario that she could possibly find herself in.

“I wore a wig in the Jacuzzi. I had a wig I wore around the house. I had a wig that I wore to events. I had a wig that I wore when I worked out,” she listed, admitting that they had become an essential part of her look for all of the wrong reasons. “I never showed my natural hair. It was a crutch, not an enhancement.”

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Wigs definitely were a crutch for Viola, who admitted that they improved how she saw herself. She even believed that they made her look more presentable to other people long after her alopecia had been treated, and other people’s opinion of her appearance was a huge deal to her then. “I was so desperate for people to think that I was beautiful. I had to be liberated from that [feeling] to a certain extent,” Viola shared.

She freed herself from those concerns at the 2012 Oscars, when she walked the red carpet while sporting a natural ‘do! She still wears wigs, of course, but she said that these days “it’s an option … when it used to never be an option.”

Viola looks fab either way, but we wonder whether she’ll get to show off her natural hair this season on “How To Get Away With Murder.”

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