How False Eyelashes, Wigs and Blue Contact Lenses Helped Ana de Armas Transform Into Marilyn Monroe for ‘Blonde’

How False Eyelashes, Wigs and Blue Contact Lenses Helped Ana de Armas Transform Into Marilyn Monroe for ‘Blonde’ A photo shoot for the stills of Marilyn Monroe that would feature throughout Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” now streaming on Netflix, was essential to the hair and makeup team in transforming Ana de Armas into the celebrated icon.

Jaime Leigh McIntosh, hair division head and cosmetics office head Tina Roesler Kerwin burned through over two hours every early daytime applying hair and cosmetics to de Armas.

“That photo shoot for stills gave us a chance to try out a lot of different colors and figure out what worked. It gave us a chance to figure out what worked better in black and white as opposed to color,” explains Kerwin.

Everything started with a silicone cap, rather than a standard bare cap. De Armas’ hair was dull and thick, so it should have been totally covered up, and an ordinary cap wouldn’t work because of the quantity of changes the entertainer would endure in a day.

The shoot session was done before principal filming began, and it helped immensely since they would have to recreate many of Monroe’s most iconic moments. Adds Kerwin, “Once we knew what the day and schedule was going to look like, we knew a bald cap would not survive.”

So, three custom-made silicone pieces, each side and a top, were made for de Armas that could endure the nine-week rigorous shooting schedule.

Initial, a stocking cap was put over the entertainer’s head and three new silicone pieces were applied day to day. Says Kerwin, “We wanted something durable that could hold up with the sticking and disturbing of hairpieces.”

While the duo created over 100 looks, only 50 or 60 made it into the final cut.

De Armas sported blue contact lenses for the film, and for perfecting the eye shape, Kerwin used false eyelashes on the corner of the actress’ eyelids. “It changed the eye shape,” Kerwin explains.

To reproduce 1955’s “The Long term Tingle,” wherein Monroe’s personality strolls over a tram mesh and her dress explodes in the breeze, McIntosh went through her ordinary course of preparing de Armas’ hair.

As Kerwin blended in the skin tone to match the silicone appliances and put on lashes, McIntosh says she would step in, “and the last thing we would do would be to put the wig on.”

Truly for that look, McIntosh says she didn’t have the right hairpiece, “Her hair is more limited in that film, and the one I had wasn’t sufficiently short, so I needed to twist it a piece more tight and pin it in spots to swindle the shape.” She adds, “It doesn’t coordinate, yet it’s essentially as close as I could get with what I needed to work with regardless have some development.”

With Dominik shooting in both black and white and color, Kerwin says, “I tried every red, orange and pink in my kit, I think everything was sampled at some point to see what would work in a black and white and what would work in a color.”

She adds, “I had an arsenal where some were only black and white, and others were only color, and a few in the middle where we could translate to both.”

Kerwin says contouring was also important. “When she’s younger, her face looks rounder, and when she’s older, she has that classic look.”

In reproducing “Precious stones Are a Young lady’s Closest companion” from “Noble men Favor Blondies,” Kerwin blended a fuchsia lip in with red. “It was blended to make it somewhat more extraordinary. At the point when you saw her in person it felt excessively, yet for the camera and the screen it offset. Be that as it may, we additionally needed to match the artists.”

That was where McIntosh stepped in. Without the resources to get wigs, she faced a challenge. “The gray is painted into their hair to make them more distinguished.” She adds, “There are silvery streaks painted in, and when you look at the original, you think, ‘Why would they do that?’ So we had to copy that.”

McIntosh notes, she made Armas’ hairpiece for this scene somewhat straighter. “It doesn’t have the twist and bob.” She adds, “Assuming that there’s a story to tell on that one, she was losing her V-shaped hairline in the lighting, which continued to blow it out, so Andrew made me paint it a piece hazier.”

Adds McIntosh, “It was one more in the massive list of recreations that we had to bang out quickly.”