A hairstylist who built a wedding business turning over a quarter of a million dollars a year before the pandemic wiped it out has revealed her parents stopped speaking to her when they found out she had moved into adult content.
Ophelia Ivy spent more than a decade behind the chair, winning awards, teaching the craft while still in her twenties and eventually running a mobile hair and makeup service with a team working under her.
Then the weddings stopped, the salons shut and the business she had spent years building never came back.
The 34-year-old now earns between $15,000 and $20,000 a month making adult content, but says the money came second to something she had wanted since she was 17.
What it cost her was her relationship with her mother and father.
“My parents know what I do and they are completely against it, so we do not really have a relationship,” Ophelia told Nudenewz
“I have a sister who has been very supportive. I told her right away what was going on and she has had the healthiest reaction to it.
“She said ‘I do not love it, but I love you.’
“It does not change who you are as a person.
“I have a brother as well and he has never really told me how he feels about it. He knows I do it. It is just this elephant in the room that we do not talk about.”
Ophelia grew up doing musical theatre and had a place lined up to study it at university before she took the career change.
She said: “I was like, the likelihood of me getting on Broadway is so small.
“So I thought, I do not want to be a drama teacher. What else can I do?”
She took a hairdressing class at a school near her house on a whim, loved it and never looked back. When she gets into something, she says, she goes all in.
She worked in a large salon, won awards, was teaching hairstyling at an unusually young age and went on to open her own studio.
The real money came from weddings. At its peak her mobile hair and makeup service brought in around $250,000 in a single year.
Then the pandemic arrived and, as she puts it, nobody was getting married and nobody was getting their hair done.
The idea of adult work had been sitting at the back of her mind since she was a teenager.
At 18 she auditioned to be a stripper and then talked herself out of it.
Ophelia said: “I was scared that my dad might find out, so I did not.
“I always found the adult industry intriguing but there was always a negative stigma around it. It was like, girls who do it have issues.
“I was like, well, I do not have issues, but I still find it kind of cool that people do this.
“So I let the opinions of others stop me from actually exploring it.”
Before the pandemic she had also competed in bikini and fitness modelling, which led to photo shoots and then to boudoir and implied nude work.
At one point Playboy approached her about working together. That was how her parents found out.
Ophelia, who is based in Toronto, Canada, said: “I am Italian and my parents have a pretty traditional old school Italian mentality, so they were not the most supportive of the work I was doing.”
With her wedding business refusing to recover, a friend finally pushed her over the line.
She said: “I had a friend and she is pretty big in the industry.
“She said ‘I feel like you would do great at it. I do not know why you are not just taking the leap. You have talked about it for so long.’
“So with her encouragement, and because I always felt in my gut that I wanted to try it, I just took the leap.”
That was around a year ago. The start was brutal.
Ophelia said: “I honestly just thought you could be hot and make money, but then I realised it is a different game now.
“My first month I think I made 1,500 bucks and I was like, what is this?”
Then it got worse. She signed with a management team who she says badly mishandled her page.
She said: “They screwed my page up big time.
“When I finished with them I only made 200 bucks that month, which was awful.”
She started again with someone whose approach actually matched hers and the page has grown every month since.
Ophelia said: “Every month I am growing, so that has been amazing. The financial freedom has been great.”
Much of that growth has come from an unlikely place. She runs a second Instagram account full of comedy skits, which turned out to be her most effective route to new fans and let her use the acting she had abandoned years earlier.
She said: “People want to see your personality showcased.
“It has been fun because I have been able to tap into my acting.
“A lot of people sign up because they are like, you are so funny.”
She has not given up hairdressing either, though the reason has nothing to do with money.
Ophelia said: “I still do hair once a week. Not for the money, but because a lot of my clients I have had since forever.
“They are some of the longest relationships I have ever had in my life.
“So I do it more for them.”
As for the requests, she has heard things that would make most people flinch and says she has never once been disgusted.
One fan asked her to post him a bottle of her urine so he could drink it. Another offered to pay her to wear the same underwear for a week without showering, which she turned down because the money was not worth it. A regular wants nothing but photographs of her feet in tights.
She said: “I find the psychology behind it so interesting.
“I never think that it is gross. There is obviously something for everybody and I do not want anybody to feel judged in this space.
“I always wonder what made that person realise that is their thing.
“Some of them are so specific. I am like, did he have a teacher he found hot and she wore tights?”
Her page is built around a girlfriend experience rather than one-off requests, and she says most of her fans have been with her long term.
She said: “We live in a time where everybody is on their phone and everybody is so disconnected from one another.
“Some of the people on my page, I feel this has been such a great thing for them and the relationships we have built have really helped elevate their life.”
Asked what she would say to the world if she had the platform, she did not hesitate.
Ophelia said: “When there are things that make people feel uncomfortable, they automatically default to a negative response.
“They will be like, people who do that work must have issues, or they must be on drugs, or whatever.
“Doing this work I have never felt more empowered. I feel like I am so in my element.
“I wish more people, and more women especially, could be more open minded to the fact that this work can be such a beautiful thing.”
She believes the pull was always there. At school she acted as the pretend girlfriend of a closeted friend who later went into the industry himself.
Ophelia said: “We ended up being the best of friends from that experience.
“He ended up getting into p*rn and I was just so interested in it.
“I remember being 17 and thinking, when I am an adult I want to do this.
“And it was never from a place of being messed up. It was genuine interest, because I always looked at the women as being so empowered and strong.”
Away from the camera she teaches meditation, and she is deliberately unglamorous about the money. She has splurged on nothing and wants to invest what she makes.
She added: “It has changed my life, definitely for the better.
“And I love the people in this industry. It is such a beautiful community.”
