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12 Fascinating Insider Secrets About All The Looks From “Stranger Things” This Season That Will Make You Appreciate The Show That Much More
From makeup to prosthetics, the details make all the difference.

12 Fascinating Insider Secrets About All The Looks From “Stranger Things” This Season That Will Make You Appreciate The Show That Much More

Just a few short weeks ago, the world was given the gift of Stranger Things Season 4, Vol. 1 on Netflix. There was a lot to unpack and discuss in the seven episodes including — in my opinion — the show’s beauty looks.

Tina Rowden / Tina Rowden/Netflix / Via Netflix

“Because everyone’s playing way younger than their actual age, it’s really easy to accidentally make them their own age. So we have to be really careful,” Amy told BuzzFeed. 

2. However, Amy said in some instances, depending on the character and their storyline, her and her team are instructed to make some of the characters look more mature. “When we did Nancy and Robin’s look for when they went to the asylum, we were supposed to make them look older and more academic,” Amy told BuzzFeed.

Courtesy of Netflix

3. In the above scene with Nancy and Robin, Amy said it took her and her team three separate makeup trials to nail the characters’ final looks because, in each test, the actors were still “too pretty.”

Tristar Media / WireImage / Via Getty Images

“I was like, ‘Well, you cast really beautiful women,'” she said. “But there is a fine line — especially in this day and age when people use social media a lot. Everybody knows what these [actors] look like in their day-to-day,” she told BuzzFeed. 

“I have to make sure that we don’t accidentally make them into them as a person — versus them as their character,” Amy continued. 

One ongoing example? “I’ve been changing Natalia’s [who plays Nancy] eyebrow shape since I started. I was just like, ‘You look too much like you still.’ So every new person that comes in to do her makeup, I’m always coming back in and just making a couple of tweaks [to her brows],” she said. 

4. Amy said it’s a collaborative process when putting a character’s beauty look together — and her team looks at a ton of sources, including old yearbooks from the time period the show is set in.

Courtesy of Amy L. Forsythe

“I love collaboration. It’s how I work best. We’ll put look books together and I’ll pull inspiration from yearbook photos and magazines from the time.” she told BuzzFeed. 

5. The actors were very involved in the process of evolving their character’s makeup looks in Season 4.

Courtesy of Amy L. Forsythe

“A character like Karen Wheeler evolves because she’s going to the salon a lot, so she’s flipping through those magazines,” Amy told BuzzFeed. “She’s watching TV and kind of bringing that into her look. She’s also got that gaggle of girls she went to the pool with — so they’re a little bit more like outsiders at Hawkins.” 

6. Some actors’ looks only change in very subtle ways from season to season. “Nancy, for instance, has always been the same color palette. We just changed her lip color this year to be less of a berry and more on the coral side,” Amy said.

Netflix

7. For others, the change is more noticeable. “For Robin, Maya [Hawke] and I discussed her character a lot because she wanted [her beauty looks] to be different than the previous season. In the prior one, we had only really seen her in the Scoops Troop outfit,” she continued.

Netflix

“The most fun I have is creating the character for the first time — and finally getting to see it come to life with all of the different parts,” Amy told BuzzFeed.

Netflix

“And then even more so when it’s a show like this, where you get to see the characters evolve.”

8. In order to see each character’s progression throughout the seasons, Amy relies on a wall of Polaroid photos.

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Courtesy of Amy L. Forsythe

“Every actor prefers different brands — and every actor’s skin reacts differently to different products,” she told BuzzFeed. “We’re all over the place with the brands we use — but it’s anything that has a nice satin finish,” she told BuzzFeed. She listed Lancome, MAC, Nars, and Fenty as some brands that are used on set.

“We don’t want them too matte and we don’t want them too shiny.” Amy told BuzzFeed. “For some actors, I have to use a mattifying primer because if not, we’ll need to blot them. In person, it looks fine. But on the monitor, it can read as really oily.”

Amy L Forsythe

10. For scenes where actors — like Max (played by Sadie Sink) — look like all the color has been drained from their face, Amy used a specific correcting cream to make them look intentionally washed out.

Courtesy of Netflix / Via Netflix

“I use Dr. Jart+ Cicapair Tiger Grass Color Correcting Treatment on all the kids in the lab — so that all the color was out of their skin. It’s a really cool product to use. I’m not using it for its intended purpose of just canceling out redness. I’m really putting it all over their face to really cancel everything out,” she said.

11. Of all of the looks created for Season 4, Amy had several favorites. Two of Amy’s favorites were Chrissy and Angela’s — the mean girls in California.

Amy L Forsythe

And that was because Amy and her team often got to experiment more makeup-wise with secondary characters — versus lead characters. “It’s too distracting sometimes on the leads because we already know who they are. Instead, we go a little bit different with new people,” Amy explained.

Amy L Forsythe

“Jason was fun. The jock boy, going off the rocker. Eddie was fun — his tattoos and hand scribbles. And just getting into the detail of each character and who they are,” Amy continued.

Courtesy of Netflix / Via Netflix

“And then when you see them for the first time on camera and see what the actor is putting into the character. It just really makes it come alive and it’s the coolest thing,” she said.

12. The prosthetic work done on Steve (played by Joe Keery) this season took the longest for several reasons. There was both the hours-long detail of the actual look — plus the fact that it started shooting in 2019, paused for the pandemic, then picked up again. Through it all, Amy and her team had to keep a close eye on logistics and continuity.

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@amylforsythe / Via Instagram: @undefined

Amy said in addition to all of Steve’s prosthetics — which included a lot of blood and dirt work in the scene when he was dragged into the lake and bit by the bats — the timing of when they shot those scenes was incredibly spread out.

“We started shooting that in 2019. When we came back from the pandemic, we usually would shoot in order, but because all of the beginning scenes had such big crowds, we didn’t know how to approach that with COVID yet,” she told BuzzFeed. 

“And because the [larger creative team] had all the time during the shutdown to write the scripts, [my team] just started bouncing around wherever we could catch things and film,” Amy told BuzzFeed.

“It was so many different people having to cover [Steve’s look].  We also had to go to different locations — Atlanta and Albuquerque — to shoot,” she explained. 

“It got kind of bonkers, but I feel like everyone did a killer job that had to take over that look, and we had a good time getting to know Joe for that long every day. And he would play podcasts so we got to know what he likes a little bit more, which was fun,” Amy said. 

For more from Amy L. Forsythe, follow her on Instagram.

What’s been your favorite look from Stranger Things so far? Share in the comments!