'Wicked' Movie Beauty: How Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande Transformed Into the Witches of Oz

glamour.com:

even began rehearsals as Elphaba for the onscreen adaptation of , started collecting green makeup. Lots of it.As the film's lead makeup designer, Hannon wanted to get ahead of the most important task at hand: transforming Erivo into the Wicked Witch of the West.

Erivo was in America during the early stages of planning, but over in London where filming would take place, Hannon was well-underway with researching and developing Elphaba's look—particularly her striking green skin.After a period of “trawling products around streets and shops” and plenty of research, Hannon began creating custom green body makeup with special effects makeup manufacturer .“We started by bringing in models with the correct skin tone and airbrushed different color greens every day to find the right color green for the skin tone,” Hannon tells Glamour. “We'd look at that in all different lights.

We'd go out in the daylight, into the sunlight, into the shade, pre-cameras and pre-sets."Nailing the correct green early on was paramount; it was the deciding factor in whether or not visual effects would be needed to create Elphaba's green skin, which Hannon wanted to avoid.

But with every test trial, she kept running into the same problem.“We found that what looked great inside in warm light, looked absolutely awful in a blue skylight outside,” she says. "We had to develop something that worked for every light because on set Cynthia would move through many, many different light changes in one scene, let alone in one day.