“The Color Purple” Makeup Department Head Carol Rasheed Finds Music in Many Shades
Like its heroine, Celie (Fantasia Barrino), The Color Purple is a story that continually grows in boldness and beauty over time. Director Blitz Bazawule’s musical version of Alice Walker’s classic tale of hope and sisterhood is a vivid interpretation for a new generation.
Makeup department head Carol Rasheed approached the film with a clear intention and steadfast goals. She exchanged vision boards, music, and more with Bazawule for nearly six months to prepare for the shoot. Their meticulous planning produced a natural and realistic depiction of the characters.
“A lot of the elements – in terms of the beauty that’s in the skin – came through,” she explained. “I made sure that my team and I did not over-makeup. You can still see the texture in the skin. You can see the oils bleeding through from the skin, just really making the melanin pop off the screen.”
Rasheed has gained a reputation as a “skin specialist” for her talent in matching any shade with precision. One of the most powerful elements affecting skin is time, and The Color Purple spans more than three decades. Rasheed ensured that the characters looked appropriate for each stage of their lives.
“[Bazawule] made it very clear very early on that he wanted our skin, Black skin, to age like Black people generally age,” she shared. “I think so often when you see Black people aged on screen in the past, they’re always over-aged. They look very, very old. With this, it wasn’t as dramatic. It was more of a subtle aging like how people age.”
Sisters Celie and Nettie are introduced as children, which called for two actresses to fill each role. Rasheed credits the casting team for the remarkable natural similarities between Fantasia Barrino and Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as Celie and Halle Bailey and Ciara as Nettie. To maintain consistency, Rasheed paid careful attention to their attributes and made special accommodations to carry features from one actor to the other.
“One of the things with the Nettie character specifically, Halle Bailey, has a mole on her face,” she noted. “The decision was made when I talked to Blitz about it, ‘Let’s just leave that. That’s her natural look.’ I said, ‘OK, no problem.’ But what happened is, when the older Nettie came, which was played by Ciara, she didn’t have a mole up there, so we had to create a mole to go up there to tie in the two characters together.”
Unthinkable suffering takes hold of Celie early in her life. Rasheed muted the natural youthful blush of Phylicia Pearl Mpasi’s complexion to give her a more hardened appearance.
“She has beautiful, full, pink lips,” Rasheed observed. “Of course, the lips made her look really rosy and beautiful, so we had to take that color of rosiness out of her lips. We did that by darkening her natural color in her lip.”
Eventually, Celie finds someone who brings the color back to her world and her lips. She finds unexpected counsel in the glamorous and confident Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson). Hoping to highlight the beauty in Celie that she had never recognized in herself, Shug shares her lipstick. Rasheed specially designed the lip color used for that scene and provided it for the props department.
“Celie supposedly goes and grabs her lipstick color to put it on Celie’s mouth, that is the only time where the color is similar,” Rasheed revealed. “I gave them that color to use that was close to what Taraji was going to wear.”
Throughout the rest of the film, she ensured that each woman wore a unique tone of red that was reflective of their individuality. Rasheed experimented with endless blends to perfectly match the characters with the color that served them best.
“I had lipsticks from every shade. I had blue-reds, true reds, orange-reds, purple-reds, pink-reds,” Rasheed laughed. “My main focal point was to make sure I did not have any woman in the movie have the same shade of red.”
After filming wrapped, Rasheed had a revelation that the palette she mixed would celebrate women offscreen as well. She developed the Evolution of Rouge lip line inspired by the ladies of The Color Purple. The smooth, rich, and vibrant formula comes in three bold shades that are now available to order.
“Women are all going to want a red and match these reds, so I came up with the Evolution of Rouge lipstick trio that is paying homage to the ladies of the movie,” Rasheed noted. “The colors are very similar. I did a blue-red, which is what Celie wore, and then I put affirming names with all of them. I AM Hope is very similar to what I used on Fantasia in the movie.”
I AM Resilient is a berry red derived from Sofia’s color (Danielle Brooks) and the First Lady of the Church (Tamela J. Mann), and Shug’s colors informed the red-orange I AM Inspiration.
Far removed from the beauty of the sisterhood the women share, hard living takes its toll on the film’s most troubled character, Mister (Colman Domingo).
“In the very beginning of the movie, when Mister comes out, he’s very handsome and he’s charming in his own way. His skin is looking perfectly melanated and poppin’,” Rasheed described. “As time went on, the meaner he got, the more I stripped away color out of his skin. I darkened under his eyes a little bit. I made everything more imperfect as the movie went on.”
Rasheed and her team hand-laid facial hair when Mister went a day and then a week without shaving. She credits The Color Purple for stretching her skillset with effects makeup from a bump on Harpo’s (Corey Hawkins) head to the injuries Sofia endures.
“I designed and ordered two different versions of an eye after [Sofia’s] beating that we had inserted to make her look like she had a bloodshot eye from the cut in her brow,” Rasheed relayed solemnly. “Giving her a bloody nose, giving her a bruised face – that all played a role into breaking that character down when she first was beat to the end of the movie when she’s sitting in prison. I had another eye designed for that look when she was cleaned up and healed. It was a whole work of progress in terms of following that character through each trauma that she experienced. We did that with makeup.”
A dedication to the details was labor intensive throughout filming. The early 20th-century setting called for a clean slate, even across the many dancers and background actors.
“Supposedly, back in those times, nobody had their nose pierced. Nobody had tattoos on their necks and on their arms and on their legs and on their backs and chests. We had hundreds of tattoos to cover. I still have big nightmares about that,” Rasheed laughed.
A flashy musical number set on the water called for a glistening look. Rasheed applied oil to all the dancers.
“We shot that particular scene in the height of summer in Savannah, Georgia,” she recalled. “It was June and July, 100-degree weather. So, of course, we were using sunscreen to protect the skin, but it also gave the skin the shine we needed in addition to putting oil on the skin as well to give it that glow.”
She applauds cinematographer Dan Laustsen for the film’s lighting. “He’s a master of his craft. He understood how to light our skin properly. That goes a long way.”
Each department on set delivered making The Color Purple a worthy revival. “The movie is very inspiring,” Rasheed promised. “It’s not like the first Color Purple at all. There are some threads of it, which you could never lose the thread of The Color Purple. This movie, I feel like it was happier. The music was phenomenal. Just the work the actors even put in. It’s just mind-blowing.”
The Color Purple is in theaters now.
For more on The Color Purple, check out these stories:
“The Color Purple” Editor Jon Poll on Finding the Rhythm of This Moving Adaptation
“The Color Purple” Costume Designer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck’s Stunning Creations
Featured image: TARAJI P. HENSON as Shug Avery in Warner Bros. Pictures’ bold new take on a classic, “THE COLOR PURPLE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.Photo by Ser Baffo
