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Before Cynthia Erivo even began rehearsals as Elphaba for the onscreen adaptation of Wicked, Frances Hannon started collecting green makeup. Lots of it.
As the film’s lead makeup designer, Hannon wanted to get ahead of the most important task at hand: transforming Erivo into the Wicked Witch of the West. Erivo was in America during the early stages of planning, but over in London where filming would take place, Hannon was well-underway with researching and developing Elphaba’s look—particularly her striking green skin.
After a period of “trawling products around streets and shops” and plenty of research, Hannon began creating custom green body makeup with special effects makeup manufacturer David Stoneman.
“We started by bringing in models with the correct skin tone and airbrushed different color greens every day to find the right color green for the skin tone,” Hannon tells Glamour. “We’d look at that in all different lights. We’d go out in the daylight, into the sunlight, into the shade, pre-cameras and pre-sets.”
Nailing the correct green early on was paramount; it was the deciding factor in whether or not visual effects would be needed to create Elphaba’s green skin, which Hannon wanted to avoid. But with every test trial, she kept running into the same problem.
“We found that what looked great inside in warm light, looked absolutely awful in a blue skylight outside,” she says. “We had to develop something that worked for every light because on set Cynthia would move through many, many different light changes in one scene, let alone in one day. And there was no way we could change the makeup to alter the different lighting.”
During one of her shopping outings, Hannon discovered the key: a small tube of neon-based eye makeup from Canada. “A teeny weeny little thing, it was discontinued,” she says. “I brought that to David and he took the base of the neon and put a few drops into the green that we already created, and it just gave the reflective quality that we didn’t have. And within that, it worked in every light. We ticked that box straight away and that was before we got Cynthia in the country. It was going to be makeup, which was a great joy to us because of course it’s lovely to do your art.”
