There’s a common thread among all characters in Tell Me Lies: toxicity. The Hulu drama, which had its Season 2 finale on Oct. 16, is rife with college teens making a slew of unhealthy choices, be it a grueling tit-for-tat with a manipulative ex-boyfriend or a scandalous relationship with a professor’s husband.
For Jenny Lin, the show’s lead makeup artist, it’s all about translating the toll that these choices take on the characters in a visual way.
Tell Me Lies revolves around Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and her decades-spanning relationship with narcissistic upperclassman Stephen (Jackson White), who she first meets in her freshman year at the fictional Baird College in 2007.
Lin, who was in college in the early 2000s, cites MTV reality series The Hills, which catapulted its star, Lauren Conrad, into the spotlight, as her “main” source of beauty inspiration. Britney Spears is a big reference, too.
“Grace and I would be like, ‘Oh, that’s iconic Lucy right there,’” Lin told Yahoo Entertainment of the Conrad’s and Spears’s looks that inspired the show.
More than just a nostalgic, mid-aughts period piece, Tell Me Lies showcases the evolving relationship that girls have with makeup as they continue to come of age. Every shade of eyeshadow, lip gloss or blush is chosen with purpose and intentionality. It’s meant to tell a story, nuanced or otherwise.
Season 2, which is now streaming in its entirety on Hulu, picks up in sophomore year, with Lucy ready to start fresh following her very public split from Stephen at the end of the last school year. She’s ditched the mid-aughts beauty mainstays of overlined lips and bronzy, smoky eyes that characterized the height of that relationship for a more “pulled back” look, returning to her neutral, more pinkish palette of early Season 1.
“[Lucy] went from super preppy, clean and straight from New York … to wearing so much makeup [when] she was trying so hard and spiraling,” Lin recalled of the first season. “At the top of Season 2, she’s still wearing makeup, but she’s wearing it like armor.”
Lucy can’t seem to escape Stephen, even when she tries. He berates her over voicemail, humiliates her in front of their friends and even goes so far as to drive her new boyfriend Leo (Thomas Doherty) away … twice. But in the season finale, Lucy and Stephen actually appear to be giving their toxic romance another go.
Should Tell Me Lies be renewed for Season 3, Lin doesn’t think Lucy and Stephen’s reunion will affect the way she does Lucy’s makeup.
“It’s not going to be as extreme as before because she’s more comfortable about it,” she said of Lucy. “It’s going to be very subtle.”
But in Season 2, not every “makeup storyline,” as Lin calls it, is as nuanced.
Lucy’s friend Bree (Catherine Missal) has continued to gravitate toward a heavier, sultrier style of makeup — punctuated by a deep red lip — as a direct result of her intensifying affair with Oliver (Tom Ellis), her English professor’s husband. She intentionally tries to mirror Oliver’s wife, Marianne (Gabriella Pession), in hopes of seeming older and more mature than she actually is.
“[Bree] is trying to impress Oliver,” Lin said. “Every time she’s in Marianne’s classroom, she’s just watching her. She is staring at Marianne’s dark polish, and then in the next episode, we see that she also has dark polish … and then she actually wears the same smoky purple eye look like Marianne just for that one episode … She is trying to be her own version of Marianne.”
There’s a moment in an episode where Bree, under Oliver’s instruction, immediately wipes off her red lipstick and meets him privately during the party he and Marianne are hosting. The use of red lipstick in this scene, Lin told Yahoo, illustrates the tragedy of Bree’s situation — and the lengths she’ll go to for him.
“The red lip moment is the height of it all. [It’s] the ultimate showcasing of what she’s willing to do,” she said. “It’s just really sad that she’s [succumbing] to his dominance.”
For Pippa (Sonia Mena), Lucy and Bree’s other best friend, a natural, bare face takes on a different meaning. As the victim of an assault earlier in the season, Pippa intentionally pulls away from her typically glamorous, full face of makeup. Instead, she takes comfort in a simpler look as if to avoid unwanted attention.
“[Pippa] is always the one doing the other girls’ makeup in Season 1,” Lin said. “It was completely intentional [to pull back on her makeup] because she was struggling with the trauma of what happened … She kind of retreats. She came in hot at the top of the school year, and then she was kicked down pretty hard for the rest of it.”
Pippa finds an unlikely friend in Stephen’s on-again and off-again girlfriend Diana (Alicia Crowder) while coping with the aftermath of the assault. Though Stephen and Diana start off the season as a seemingly solid couple, Diana begins to see cracks in the stories he’s told her. Her whole world is crumbling, but you wouldn’t notice just by looking at her. Diana, like Lucy, uses makeup as a means of protecting herself from Stephen.
“Her makeup has always stayed similar because she needs to look put together,” Lin explained. “She’s starting to realize what kind of person [Stephen] is, but she’s protecting herself … She’s still going to make [him] feel like everything’s OK.”
For Lin, makeup mirrors the chaos and complexity of these emotions and relationships.
“It’s a way for girls to express themselves,” she said. “I think that’s why so many people connect with the show.”
Tell Me Lies is available to stream on Hulu.
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