“[The hair] is kind of its own character,” Stacey says. “It says something about who she is. It’s this constant reminder of this really stark, jet-black hair against all this amazing color. She doesn’t fit in everything around her. She’s kind of alien in all of that — she’s different.”
The length and style also serve as a way to distinguish Bella from her former self as well as other women of that time. “She doesn’t know that there are society norms, and when you go back in history, [an updo] would be the proper thing to have; not to see your hair down like that,” Stacey says. “But Bella wouldn’t know any of those rules. And that’s why it’s such a display of who she is.”
To accomplish the varying hair lengths, Stacey micro braided underlying sections of Stone’s natural hair on either side of her head; wefts of hair were anchored to the braids and then blended with the natural hair. As Bella’s “grew,” Stacey switched to longer wefts, going from 30 inches to 36 inches and ending with 42 inches of hair — almost 4 feet long.
With the exception of one character, wigs were not utilized in the film at all, according to Stacey, because Lanthimos “hates” them. “I think even with the best wigs, if you saw that it was fake, it takes everything away from who Bella is,” Stacey says. “She’s this pure being.” She also notes that Mark Ruffalo’s hair and mustache in the film were his own and styled accordingly.
A Moment for Makeup
One of the only times we see makeup in the film is when Bella makes her way to Paris and starts working at a brothel with sex workers under Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter). For their makeup, Stacey says they played off the colors of the film’s sets, which incorporate shades of “anatomical things.” Think shades of pink and purple to represent veins and red for blood.