Since Netflix released the first four episodes of Wednesday season two, the world's most stoic goth icon has been even more mesmerizing than before. The braids are sharper, the glares are colder, and, of course, there is a haunting new detail that instantly transfixed us all: her black tears.
Previously, Wednesday said she doesn’t “do tears” because “emotions are a gateway trait.” But in season two, we are privy to tears galore — even if not the emotional kind. Wednesday's tears are a side effect of psychic exhaustion, according to her mother, and they are fittingly dramatic and black, perfectly suiting Jenna Ortega's portrayal of the sardonic character. And no, they are not CGI.
Speaking to Teen Vogue, Emmy award-winning hair and makeup artist Nirvana Jalalvand breaks down the specifics on the creative chaos in bringing Wednesday's black tears to life, including product testing everything from eye blood to water-based paints, and a last-minute custom creation from Paris.
A whole year before the cameras even rolled on season two, the Teen Vogue team was already getting their hands dirty (or face, actually) alongside Jalalvand, with yours truly acting as a test subject for the creation of black tears — a.k.a getting you a BTS of the BTS.
Beyond the full breakdown on the tears, we also got Jalalvand to dish on the details of her custom-blended lip pot and the changes needed to take Wednesday from season one to season two in terms of glam. Come for the black tears, but stay for behind-the-scenes details and a deeper look at the dedication, ingenuity, and sheer talent of the HMUA that makes Wednesday’s world so flawlessly dark and captivating.
Nirvana Jalalvand: When you are reading a script, at least for me, I'm always waiting for a note about something hair and makeup related, because [as an HMUA] that's what really gets you excited. Immediately, within the first couple of pages, I saw the “black tears fall from Wednesday's eyes.” And I was like, “Okay, that's really cool, [but] they'll probably wanna do it in visual effects.” And then I remembered, no, this is Tim Burton, we're gonna be doing this for real, so you better start thinking about how you're gonna make her cry black.
I was worrying, because the minute you are messing around with eyes, you have to be really careful. So I pulled every black product I have in my kit and started pouring it down my face, but nothing was quite right, so I needed a test model to start figuring this out. I literally had two or three weeks max to sort this out.
I came along with a few different products. There was a black eye blood from Kryolan; I tried that. We tried some water-based face paint and different ways of applying it to the skin. We did hand-painted with the thought that maybe digital effects could pipe in and make it so it pours down our eyes using my markers as trackers. But nothing was quite right.
We watered down different eye bloods, and there were moments when we thought it could work, but it just wasn't a hundred percent right. Then, later that night, I had this idea: I knew of this product that is a cream, and the minute water hits it, it starts bleeding — but it starts bleeding red. I thought that could work if it bled black, so I brought it along to my test.
We put it under both of our eyes and tried to cry like the actors to activate it. Because my thought was, If you've got an amazing actor like Jenna [Ortega], the minute she starts crying, although it'll look like there's nothing there, the minute a tear hits it, it's gonna start running, and it'll run black. So that was my thought process. But then I was like, “Okay, how do I get this product in black? Because it doesn't exist.”
I spoke to the amazing team at PAM in London, which is a specialist makeup shop, and they put me in touch with Le Maquillage, which is the company that makes that product. I explained what I needed, and they were like, “Okay, we can do it because it's for Wednesday.” So bless them.
In Paris, they started making this product, and they sent some out, and it was amazing. It did exactly what I thought it was going to. But as with anything, you try these things and then the director [has tweaks]. So, unfortunately, we didn't end up using that.
So then I was like, “Right, there's one other time I've seen someone cry black tears, and it was in the Billie Eilish music video [for "When the Party's Over"]." There's a behind-the-scenes video of that on YouTube, and they basically did it with a rig that went down her forehead, and then they painted the rig out in post.
So I was like, “Well, maybe we could do that.” Because I didn't know how many tears Tim [Burton] wanted either. I hadn't sat in a room with him yet to discuss exactly what he wanted. I basically needed to think of all the options possible to present them to him, and hopefully one of them [would stick].
I managed to find out who created the product that went through the rig, and it was the amazing David Stoneman, who makes all the blood I use — makes absolutely everything. So I was like, “Of course it was him!” I love all of his products. I reached out to him and again was like, [in panicked voice] “I need it at the end of this week!” Before I knew it, he had shipped five liters of this stuff to Ireland for me, and it literally arrived a couple of days before I was camera testing it. We ended up just using that.
We tried it through the rig. We did loads of testing, but it was actually just too much. In the end, Tim was just like, “What if we roll the camera and you just come in and you drop it on and we just watch it roll down the face?” And it worked beautifully because it had this translucency to it; after all, we still wanted it to look like a tear. We didn't want it to look like paint, but like it needed to flow, and also be black. It was all about finding that balance, and it worked beautifully.
There was a scene in part one where she wakes up, and the tears have dried on her face. And that product didn't work dry; it worked perfectly wet, but it didn't work dry. So I went back to one of our original tests where I had done a streak of water and then put face paint in that streak of water, and that was what I did when they needed to be dry on her face. Then, when she wipes them away with a handkerchief, we just put a bit of makeup remover on the back, and it was like the perfect two. So if it was wet, there was one version, and if it was dry, there was another version, basically.
NJ: It actually wasn't too bad because that product moved so perfectly. As long as I put it in the right place, it was fine.
I think by the time we got to filming, I knew that with anything like this, there's reset time, and the minute you wipe them off, then you wipe off the makeup underneath as well. Luckily, I don't put that much beauty makeup on Jenna anyway. But I knew that once I was dropping them on, they needed to be in the right spot.
I made sure I discussed with Jenna and Tim ahead of time where we thought the tears would come from. I would sometimes put one on, and they would go, “Oh, just one more.” And I would quickly put another one on. We were pretty lucky that they actually did flow perfectly, but that's why the testing process is so important.
And like with anything, I could have spent months troubleshooting this, honestly. But, you know, I had a few weeks, and I made it work. Sometimes when you are testing things, you have to push it really far and go through loads of ideas and loads of complicated ways of doing things. Sometimes it is the simpler ideas that you end up coming back to, and that is part of the process. Sometimes you push it far, then you rein it in.
NJ: [During season one], it took an hour to do her normal hair and makeup. [For season two], I think because we've created this now, like, really iconic look, I was like, “I'm not gonna stray away from this.”
Although Wednesday does have her makeup done, it's almost meant to be a bit campy in the sense that the whole show's a bit campy, and that's just what she looks like. She isn't getting up and doing her makeup. She just has a pale face and chiseled cheekbones, and she just has the perfect amount of smudge around her eye, and a berry lip. That is what Wednesday looks like in the world of Wednesday, you know? She wakes up like that, she goes to sleep like that, nothing ever changes unless she's got a particular thing she's going to.
I kept it true to what we did on season one because I think it worked, and people received it well, and I think it suits Jenna perfectly. So everything was pretty similar. The only thing I changed ever so slightly was the amount of makeup I put on her, because a couple of years have gone by since we shot season one. As with all the cast, you know, they were teenagers when we started it, and now they're late teens or, in Jenna's case, hitting her 20s. So people change and grow up in that time, of course. I discovered that the more makeup I put on her, the more grown-up it made her look. So I pulled it back a little bit this time because I wanted to make sure we were keeping it true to season one.
NJ: Honestly, pretty much the same. The only thing we switched out was her base product because the one we were using is discontinued. The one I use now is the Pat McGrath Labs
Skin Fetish Sublime Perfection foundation. I use a combination of shades to create the perfect Wednesday shade for Jenna.
NJ: Give or take, I did. In fact, there were two things I did that were ever so slightly different, though the outcome is still the same. I used a haircare product from Tracee Ellis Ross's Pattern Beauty. They make an excellent braiding product, which is obviously aimed at braiding Black hair, but it's such a good product, and it doesn't go white.
Anytime there is a little tuck from the braid, I would stick it down with that. I also used a crochet hook. People used to joke when they saw me with that; they'd be like, “Oh, here Nirvana comes, knitting Jenna's hair.”
But I had this little crochet hook in my bag, and if there was a tuck, I would tuck it back in with the crochet hook. During season one, I used to faff around trying to stick it back in, and it didn't work. But if you have a crochet hook, it's perfect. So that's what you need to get a perfect braid in any sense, actually.
NJ: There's a real luxury in having a season two of something and getting to revisit a character because you can perfect and hyperanalyze your work. There were definitely tiny little things I noticed in season one where I'd be like, "Oh, I wish I'd done that" or “I wish I'd done this.” This time around, it's slight, insignificant things that probably no one else is observing in the way I'm observing, but that's my job.
The lip color that I settled on in the end and the lip pot worked really well, so I did that again this season. It was like, if it's not broke, don't fix it.
So many brands sent me purple berry, cherry lipsticks in the hopes that I was going to choose one of their lipsticks, but none of them had the right undertone. And one thing about me is I'm a real, real fussy woman when it comes to an undertone, and I can spot it a mile off. If someone's eyebrows are too ashy and they don't match the ashiness or the warmth of the hair, it drives me bonkers. And I feel the same about this lipstick. There is something that is so perfect for Jenna's skin tone and the Wednesday look that I get from that little lip pot I made up, and I've yet to find a lipstick that gives me the same tone when it's put on naturally.
NJ: Yeah, it's a clear lip balm and MAC's Nightmoth lip liner. Any clear lip balm works, but the one I used this season was the Bobbi Brown one, which comes in a little tin, and it's pink. That one's got really nice consistency to it, and it worked really well when you mix it with a lip liner. But, yeah, the eye shadow products stayed the same, although MAC has just discontinued one of the gray shades that I use, so I'm going to have to find a dupe for that [for season three].
NJ: Well, I've watched episodes one to four now, and I'm genuinely almost a hundred percent happy with everything I'm seeing, which is a big thing for me to say. [Laughs] There are always little things where you think, Ah, I wish I did that or I wish that didn't look like that. But generally speaking, at least for when we were filming, everything looked great, so I'm really happy with how it's turned out.
NJ: I mean, I'm really lucky with Jenna. I'm super close with her, and she's very trusting and collaborative with me when it comes to any ideas I have. We both felt that what we had done in season one worked and that we would keep it true to that.
But when we were talking about the black tears, she was heavily involved in what it felt like and what it looked like. It was obviously super important for her as an actor to feel like she could wear that and act with it. It's such a big part of Wednesday's storyline and character arc this season, I wanted to make sure she felt it was right. She was a good sport with me putting black down her face every five seconds. [Laughs] So yeah, I was very lucky.
NJ: I guess at the end of episode four, we see Wednesday getting smashed through a window. It's a really quick moment, but that took a lot of planning because, even in the world of Wednesday, if someone's being thrown through a window, that's a pretty intense amount of injuries to sustain. [Laughs]
I am really into my special effects makeup, so I was like, “I need to get all these prosthetics made.” I knew the scene was going to be set in the pouring rain, and it is really tricky to work with blood when you are in the pouring rain because it's all gonna rub off immediately, so that took a lot of testing as well, to figure out a way of making the blood waterproof but not so waterproof that it doesn't run when the rain hits it.
We shot that scene at the very end of the day, and they literally did it in one take, because once you drench someone like that, you really don't have much room to go. We knew we had to nail it on the first go, so I spent a long time mixing different bloods with different sealers to figure out how I could get it to stay. I eventually found the perfect combination. So on the day, I put Jenna in all the cuts and prosthetics. There's a big gash she has on her head as well. I had to figure out a way of getting that in the hair, which can be quite a tricky place to put a prosthetic.
It was a quick turnaround for that scene. I think I did that makeup in about an hour by myself, which is pretty quick considering she had about 38 pieces [of prosthetics] all over her face, neck, and hands. I dripped the watertight blood on, and then when we got on set and she was laid out in position, we did a test run without the water. Then I came in and I reapplied wet blood to all the areas, and the props team poured it all on the floor, and then they put the rain on, and they got the shot.
I think it looked really good, actually, because you can see all the blood pouring off her face. I was really happy with that. It was important because I knew that was going to be an important scene and it was going to implicate her makeup look in part two, as well.
NJ: Yes. A little tease for you. When you see the teaser for part two, you see her lying in a bed, so I'll leave it at that.
