Emmy’s snub aside, there’s no doubt that Daisy Edgar-Jones’ performance as Marianne in the breakout hit Normal People was one of the best of the year. Playing out a character’s life over the course of five years (especially over the transformative teenage to adulthood ones), is no easy task, and yet Edgar-Jones navigated it seamlessly.
While her talent was of course the primary player in ensuring the evolution was believable, makeup certainly helped.
One of the products most heavily relied upon by the show’s makeup artist Sharon Doyle? Blush. And though a fresh flush stayed constant through the years, it was the placement that allowed Doyle to differentiate Marianne’s younger iteration from her older one, according to Edgar-Jones herself.
“Blusher was used quite a bit by my makeup artist on Normal People, Sharon, to help tell the story of Marianne aging from 17 to 22,” she explained in a makeup tutorial shared via beauty brand @hourglasscosmetics.
“For the younger Marianne, she would not only would put the blusher on the apples of the cheeks but she would also bring it down to this sort of area,” she says, pointing to the sides of her lower cheeks. “[It would give the look of] an overall flushed youthful complexion which I thought was a really handy trick.”
The blush accounted for the bulk of the younger Marianne’s makeup look, too, with just a touch of subtle coverage beneath. “[For] early Marianne, it would be just concealer [for coverage, and then] I would get blush all the way up — you know when you’re young and you kind of blush a lot?” she told Vulture of the character’s early aesthetic.
In other words, if you want to take five years off your face, a flush on the lower cheeks is the way to do it (though as Edgar-Jones points out, it may feel a tad reminiscent of adolescent embarrassment)…
