Can you handle 22 inches? asks a billboard in Orem, Utah, near exit 269 on Interstate 15. The question sits next to an image of Jessi Draper — local mother of three — lying on her back in a black minidress, chestnut hair spilling down toward the highway. Utah County, located about 45 minutes south of Salt Lake City, is nicknamed “Happy Valley” for its concentration of canonically nice, wholesome Mormons, who make up over 70 percent of the residents. A few miles north in Pleasant Grove is the home of JZ Styles, Draper’s salon-and-hair-extension empire, a low white complex nestled among strip malls and drive-throughs. “We like to call this Hair Candy Land,” Draper says as she shows me around a cavernous warehouse, where thousands of extensions, with names like Angel Food Cake (white blonde) and Cherry Cola (reddish brunette), hang like furry wallpaper.
It’s an unseasonably warm day in December; snowcapped mountains rise dramatically above the salon, but down here in the valley, some guys are wearing shorts. Draper, five-foot-two with giant blue doll eyes and waist-length highlighted waves, is wearing a green flannel shirtdress and knee-high stiletto boots. She clacks from the warehouse to the light-filled salon, where stylists sew extensions onto the heads of clients in UGGs and matching sweat-suit sets. “Everything is so crazy right now,” Draper, 33, says. By “everything” she means the deluge of attention, opportunity, and money that has transformed her life as a Utah mom and business owner in the past 15 months since she began starring in the Hulu reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
