‘The Neon Demon’ Makeup Artist On Elle Fanning’s Hauntingly Beautiful Looks

By now you’ve probably seen or heard of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s horror meets fashion film The Neon Demon. The glamorous thriller follows Jesse (Elle Fanning), a 16-year-old who moves to Los Angeles to pursue a modeling career and eventually learns how to steer her way around the rage of model-rivals Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote).

Elle Fanning as rising model Jesse in The Neon Demon. (Photo: Gunther Campine)

Jesse’s rise to the top of the fashion world is literally filled with blood, sweat, and tears. And while this teen slasher is a lot to take in, Refn says the film is a “fairytale” about the obsessiveness of beauty among a younger generation.

“On one level, beauty can be shallow and meaningless and at the same time, it can be a very sophisticated, philosophical, mind-bending subject,” he explains. “I think Elle and I very much didn’t want to criticize or do anything else but show … penetrate the audience’s mind of how we see it and continue to allow them to debate and talk about it.”

We certainly had much to discuss, namely Fanning’s bejeweled and bloody looks. Yahoo Beauty interviewed Erin Ayanian, the lead makeup artist for The Neon Demon, to get all the beauty details behind this controversial movie.

Yahoo Beauty: The Neon Demon is a thriller, but you were able to perfectly blend gore with glamour. What was your technique to accomplishing this?

Ayanian: I strove for a comprehensive look of hardness, artifice, distortion, and menace in the actor’s makeup, tempered with a little humor … I hope that’s how it comes across! It was one of my all-time favorite projects.

What was the creative process like for creating the looks? Were there any pop culture references for the makeup in the film?

For inspiration, I looked to the 1970s photographs of Guy Bourdin and Chris von Wangenheim. Their work has a colorful graphic quality that plays well with Nic Refn’s aesthetic sensibility. The 1930s work of Nazi-banned artist Hans Bellmer also lent it’s sense of distortion and menace to the look and feel of the makeup overall, especially in the character Ruby’s (Jena Malone) tattoos.

Abbey Lee’s character Sarah works all her angles in The Neon Demon. (Photo: Gunther Campine)

Can you break down the beauty looks and transformations of the leading ladies?

For Elle’s character, Jesse, it was very important to reflect the different elements of her personality as they are revealed to us, while also commenting on the other characters’ perception of her. Jesse appears very fresh-faced and young in the initial scenes with the other girls. When she is doing her shoot with Desmond Harrington’s Jack, who considers her beauty to be of the highest currency, she is all in gold. And when we see something sinister and cold possibly emerging in Jesse, her makeup becomes very hard and “done.”

Abbey Lee’s Sarah needed to be all hardness and sharp angles, so I really tried to play against the soft elements of her face and create sharp edges on her eyes and eyebrows and a predatory feel to her face overall, with the one exception being the casting scene, where we get to see how vulnerable she actually is.

Bella Heathcote’s Gigi needed to be all about artifice and have a certain overdone plastic quality, so we went with a full face of makeup all the time, red lips, lashes, and contour.

Why so serious? Bella Heathcote’s Gigi is all business. (Photo: Gunther Campine)

Which makeup products were in heavy rotation for this film?

I went through loads of lashes, MAC [Fluidline] liner in Blacktrack, Silver Dusk highlighting powder, and Chanel Glossimers in various colors.

So much blood in The Neon Demon. (Photo: Gunther Campine)

Was there a particular scene that was the most arduous?

The trickiest scenes for me were the opening scene with Jesse cleaning blood off of herself and the scene with Jack painting Jesse gold, as at every cut I had to reset or completely clean up the makeup to the top of the take again. We shot 32 takes at one point. The look for Jesse’s photo shoot with Jack took roughly 90 minutes. The gold vinyl cutouts were fixed on with Duo Surgical eyelash glue.

About how many pounds of glitter was used during the filming process? Where did you get those unique crystals for the makeup?

I can’t say how much glitter we went through during shooting, but it was a lot. Nic kept calling for more! The crystals I used were all Swarovski.

All that glitters isn’t gold. Elle Fanning in a scene from The Neon Demon. (Photo: Gunther Campine)

Do you have a favorite makeup look from the film?

My favorite makeup from the film is probably the gold one. I had made those gold appliqués for Elle a year or so prior to shooting The Neon Demon and had been saving them for the right context. I knew the opportunity had come when I read the script and saw there would be a scene where Elle would be painted gold. Nic loved the idea that the makeup Jena Malone’s Ruby had done on Jesse was Jack’s inspiration to paint her gold, so it all came together beautifully.

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