The Dune lip tattoos and Mentat secrets, explained

[Ed. note: This piece contains mild spoilers for Dune.]

It is very early in the running time of DuneIt’s a strange thing that happens. Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto Atreides (Duke Leto Atreides) mused in jest about the cost of sending an Emperor envoy to Caladan. His retainer Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson), responds by rolling his eyes in his sockets so that only the whites show. Then, his tattooed lips can spit out exact monetary costs of the entire production.

Director Denis Villenueve’s DuneIt has so many explanations that it can’t explain everything. However, readers are able to understand the main points. Dune the book will have a pretty good idea: Thufir Hawat, and David Dastmalchian’s Piter De Vries, are Mentats, the human computers of the world of Dune.

Dune has a need for human computers. Don’t they have regular computers?

Dune’s lore is complex, deep, and bizarre. This means that Dune’s history dates back thousands of years to the time of the events. DuneHuman society was dramatically altered after a war against artificial intelligence, known as the Butlerian Jihad. The aftermath saw humanity vow to never again create machines that could perform the human mind’s work. It was even codified into the galaxy’s dominant religion, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

So, no, the world of Dune doesn’t have any computers — not even pocket calculators. Complex calculations are done by Mentats, who have been specially trained to do them.

The right training, however, is all that’s keeping us from excelling in mathematics as well as computer programming.

Mentats get lip tattoos for a reason.

Mentat lipstick is one. Dune’s most evocative character visuals, a visual cue all Mentats share because of — this is Dune, after all — drugs. Mentats habitually drink “the Juice of Sapho,” a kind of hyper-coffee that increases their mental acuity twice over or more. Naturally, Sapho is addictive, and eventually it has the side effect of staining a user’s lips an obvious red.

Donald Mowat is the head of makeup and hair for Donald Mowat Dune, told Polygon that the “wine-stained lips” of the movie’s Mentats were among the most difficult elements to design.

“It’s ridiculous to say,” Mowat said over Zoom. “I spent a week on that. I honestly lost my mind for a minute.”

A member of his staff recommended that he look at 1984 David Lynch’s adaptation as inspiration. “I tried. The idea of blackberry and the wine stains was something I tried. And I went ‘That just looks like a kid that drank Kool Aid.’”

Universal Pictures

Mowat already worked on tattoo designs for different classes of characters, including the Fremen or Sardaukar warriors.

“That’s what made me think ‘Why does this have to be a stain? Why can’t it be a symbol in the color of wine?’ I just kept thinking about blackberries, black currant, dark. And that’s how that came to be as that little piece.”