Since Netflix released the first four episodes of Wednesday season 2, 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 2, 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, so of course, 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 makeup and hair artist Nirvana Jalalvand breaks down the specifics on the creative chaos of bringing Wednesday’s black tears to life – from product testing with everything from eye blood to water-based paints, to a last-minute custom creation from Paris. A whole year before the cameras even rolled on season 2, the Teen Vogue team was already getting their hands dirty (or face, actually) alongside Nirvana, with yours truly acting as a test subject for the making of the black tears — a.k.a getting you a BTS of the BTS.
Beyond the full breakdown on the tears, we also got Nirvana to dish on the details of her custom-blended lip pot as well as the changes needed to take Wednesday from season 1 to season 2 in terms of glam. Come for the black tears, but stay for the behind-the-scenes, deeper look at the dedication, ingenuity, and sheer talent of the MUA 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 like nothing was quite right.
We watered down different eye bloods and there were moments where we thought it could work, but it just wasn’t a hundred percent right. And then later that night, I had this idea. I knew of this product that is a cream product, 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.”
