And then she thought: how did they do it?

They were too complex, scholars argued, to have been achieved on a living person's own hair. The evidence they pointed to was the sheer scale and precision of the styles.

... the way individual hairs caught light, the way the tension distributed across a scalp.

... the seemingly impossible complexity of imperial Roman hairstyles became achievable.

Two thousand years of scholars looked at those statues and saw wigs. It took a hairdresser to look at them and see hair.

What I fear it may take another two thousand years for anyone to notice, yet is stated in that last sentence: that scholars were not looking at wigs nor was Janet looking at hair, but all were looking at marble.

That is to say, the intricate features distinguishing the design and construction of real hair from that of wigs was replicated by the creators of these statues in a level of detail so subtle as to go unnoticed for millennia yet of unerring reproduction. Who in their right mind would even bother?

I intentionally use the word "creators" rather than "sculptors" because the preconception that dudes with hammers and chisels stood around studying hair at the level of a professional hairstylist and carefully crafting the "impossible complexity" of the features and characteristics into stone... well, the idea sounds absurd when you type it out plainly. Which is what I have done.