Mad Max: Fury Road Makeup Artist Lesley Vanderwalt on the Secret to That Post-Apocalyptic Glow

“I can’t say it was one of my most beautiful films,” laughs Lesley Vanderwalt, the Australian hair and makeup designer charged with bringing Mad Max: Fury Road’s desert wasteland to life. And though it’s true that George Miller’s post-apocalyptic vision is not conventionally beautiful, there is an undeniable romanticism in the sand-strewn beauty of its unbreakable women—shot against the arid backdrops of South Africa, Namibia, and across Australia—which earned an Oscar nomination for makeup and hairstyling and made perhaps the greatest impact on the year’s statement trends. Here, ahead of tomorrow’s awards show, Vanderwalt breaks down the secrets behind Mad Max’s post-apocalyptic beauty, starting with that unearthly glow.

THE SUPERNATURAL SKIN
“We wanted the girls to glow in this dusty, dirty, filthy world—luminous, almost like a mirage, like people couldn’t believe their eyes. We used BECCA body shimmers in a few different tones, from golden or coppery colors to paler pinker shades, and would rub those on first before anything else.”

THE NO-MAKEUP MAKEUP
“We kept them very natural, obviously, down to almost nothing. Occasionally, we might enhance the eye with a little lash, or use a little bit of powder, but we didn’t use too many products. It’s always a rule of less is more when you’re out there, and they wouldn’t have had access to anything. It would have been ludicrous to have them looking like beauty queens, as if they’d have found a Sephora somewhere underground.”

THE ARTFULLY DUSTY ACCENTS
“When you work with dirt, you use it almost as a shader, sculpting the face with it a bit. You don’t purposefully do it, or it looks very fake. You do a little spot here, or smudge there. Artfully applied dirt, we call it. We have a more oil-based dirt makeup that comes in bottles. You might put that on the crease in their elbows, behind the knees, on their necks. Then we’d have Aquacolor from Kryolan in different browns, charcoals that you might break it up a bit with. Then there’d be what we call movie dust, a special effects dust. We’d use these little dust bags made with a muslin type fabric. You’d put dirt in it, tie them up like you would a little Christmas pudding, and then you just sort of knock them around, and the dirt floats gently onto them.”

THE GREASE-PAINT EYES
“We got the idea for Furiosa’s forehead look from a picture I had, of a lovely girl in Africa who had wiped clay across her forehead from her eyebrows up. It was a mixture of black Kryolan Aquacolor, and then we used MAC pigments in a rusty, coppery shade, a bit of silver, and a bit of blue, just to highlight her. We started about the eyebrows and took it back and blended it into the hairline. The highlight really enhanced her cheekbones and made the eyes pop. Furiosa probably would have used a bit of grease or oil to get that sheen, and Charlize [Theron] thought for her character, she’d reapply it like war paint.”

THE DEWY SWEAT
“There are different products we used to keep the girls shiny and sweaty. Sometimes we’d take a matte gloss in a tube and stipple it on with an orange stipple sponge, which gives you little beads of sweat. Sometimes we used glycerin and rosewater spray. We gave the girls little makeup bags to hide in the truck to reapply sweat and dirt as it rubbed off.”

THE THIRD-DAY HAIR
“The hair was very dirty. A lot of it happened in the desert. At the end of the day, it would practically be standing on end: You’d find a pile of red sand in the shower, and all of your hair was three times the thickness than when you went off in the morning. We used dust, different dry shampoos, and fillers as a starting point. The dust we used in the makeup was put through the hair. The only dry shampoo we could get in South Africa was Klorane, so we used a lot of that, along with OSiS+ Dust It mattifying powder to volumize. Then we’d use salt spray on top to create texture and scrunch it up. Toward the end, we were mixing salt into water and spraying it, we were going through so much of it.”

THE BRAIDS
“The braids on the girls were something we played with. We thought maybe that was something they’d do to each other. You’d quite often see it at school, girls sitting around braiding each other’s hair. [Furiosa’s] girls have nothing to do, no phones, no magazines, nothing. We had come up with these little ideas they might have done to each other to pass the time. Sitting there, talking, dreaming, maybe braiding each other’s hair.”

 

 

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