It’s during the film’s third act that Cassie’s above-neck theatrics reach a fever pitch. She attends a bachelor party dressed as a candy striper with cartoonish makeup and colorful, acid-bright hair. “It’s a bit of The Joker reigning mayhem,” says hairstylist Daniel Curet, who worked to bring Fennell’s vision for this scene to life by splicing two different candy-colored fantasy wigs together to achieve the right mix of fringe, texture, and colors. To add a certain grittiness, he razored out the ends and used Ouai’s Wave Spray to add some sticky hold and spike to the ends. Inspired by what Cassie would be doing in that scene, Wells created a blowup doll-inspired “wide-eyed, full-lipped” makeup look, playing up the “sad eyeliner” by layering on metallic blue eyeliner, double stacks of falsies on the upper and lower lashes, and then overlining the lips to “Joker”-like effect with MAC Retro Matte lipstick in fuchsia-red All Fired Up. “She’s spiraling,” emphasizes Wells. “It’s not supposed to be pretty.”
From a beauty perspective, Promising Young Woman doesn’t just use the power of presentation in storytelling, charting the sea changes of a character in a palpable, visually-stirring way, but it also provides provocative commentary on the sinister trap of the male gaze. At its most playful, this manifests in the “Blow Job Lips Makeup Tutorial” (featuring a cameo from Fennel as a beauty influencer) that Cassie watches to create a glossy, cherry-red lip. Then, there’s the scene in which Christopher Mintz-Plasse plays a self-proclaimed “nice guy” named Neil and tells Cassie how pretty she is before mansplaining what would make her most attractive to him.
“Why are you wearing all that makeup, do you mind me asking?” he presses. “I never understood why women wear so much makeup. It’s like you are so much more beautiful without it. It’s like guys don’t even like that kind of stuff, you know? It’s this soul-sucking system meant to oppress women and it’s fucked up. I want to see you. The real you.” Thankfully, when Cassie does show him the “real” her, there is catharsis, and lots of it, in her taking back the gaze. It’s just one instance of many that proves for Cassie, makeup is both armor and a weapon.
