How to get Batman’s eyeliner look, according to The Batman’s makeup designer

The hero of Matt Reeves’ The Batman He does something bold that none of his predecessors onscreen have ever done: When the cowl’s off, he puts on a thick, smokey-colored eye.

While Robert Pattinson’s darkly lined eyes certainly make for a compelling, unforgettable look, that aspect of his character design isn’t AllThe aesthetic. To be honest, the beauty is more about the aesthetic. Bruce Wayne has to use the eye makeup for a purpose. He needs it to hide his face and conceal his dark cowl. Living-action movies often feature Batman as a supporting role. You can also see it hereThey wore the raccoon-eyed glasses, but BatmanThe first person to admit that illusions of darkness require some cosmetic skills.

Naomi Donne, makeup designer for Polygon, says that director Matt Reeves wanted a make-up look that was focused on Batman’s immediate appearance after removing his costume.

“Matt was really keen that there were remains of [the eye makeup] when he took his cowl off,” she explains. “So we pushed that. Actually, we took off the cowl and examined what was left. We then used it. It’s really hard to get black eye makeup off, and we used that.”

Donne says it was difficult to achieve the right blend of dark and light eye makeup. Between the film’s rainy setting, the sweaty costume, and the intense action scenes, they needed something with a lot of staying power. In the end, Batman’s perfectly calibrated emo look was a mixture of pigment, a creamy eyeliner, pencil, and a liquid paint makeup.

“And then,” she says, “to brighten it up, we used this lightly sparkly pigment to give it a bit of light, so that it reflected lights in the same way his Batsuit would’ve.”

While the dark eyeliner certainly brings to mind emo and goth subcultures, Donne says Reeves’ touchpoint for Batman’s look came from a different specific source: Kurt Cobain. Reeves revealed previously how Nirvana’s song inspired his Caped Crusader take and how he lean more on a tortured Bruce Wayne rather than on a playboy billionaire. Reeves actually cast Robert Pattinson because of this connection. Naturally, the deep character threads that tie Kurt Cobain together with this Bruce Wayne figure would extend to their visual aesthetics. After all, Cobain rocked the black-eyeliner look in the ‘90s — even if it wasn’t as messy as Bruce Wayne’s getup in the movie.

“I loved that at times it was very smudged and running down his face, and at times it was just a smokey eye. It was always dirty. It always came from the remains of the cowl,” says Donne. “It was the way of Batman lingering in Bruce Wayne after he’s taken his costume off.”

But as much as we can wax on about the metaphors in eye makeup and how the lingering specter of Batman will forever haunt Bruce Wayne, Donne boils it all down to a universal truth: “It also looked dead sexy. Look at black-eyed men It is really good.”