Ballet Beauty Tips: 18 Things We Learned From the Ultimate Hair and Makeup Pros

“With lining, you need a really a steady hand. It’s just practice,” says Chelsy Meiss, second soloist at the National Ballet of Canada (she was prepping her makeup for her role as the Finger Fairy). “Just taking your time and, obviously, if it’s new to you, get up against a good mirror and start slowly. If you’re using liquid, don’t move your eye around too much or blink, because it smudges instantly. Now, because I’ve had so much practice, I can be on the bus putting on mascara no problem over the potholes in the road.”

“The first thing I do after a show is I come upstairs, take off my pointe shoes, take off my costume and put my feet in a bucket of ice and water. It’s the less glamorous process of being a ballerina. I swear by it. Once that’s over, I have a shower and wash my makeup off, then I leave the theatre like a regular person.”

“It’s important to do every step well. The eye makeup—like the shadow, the liner, the eyelashes and the eyebrows—takes the most time, just because you want the lines to be very clean and steady. It kind of works in stages—you need to step back and see how the face looks and if you have to add more in the crease of your eye. Because we’re doing this for stage, we have to imagine the lights on our face and showing 3,000 people in the audience our facial expressions.”

“For the bun, I just twist my hair and slowly pin it into the shape I want. Then I put the hairnet over the top to keep little pieces of hair from sticking out.”

“We use a mixture of bobby pins and in Australia we call them French pins—you know the pins that are open sort of in a V-shape. You find little places in the headdress that are going to anchor well, and you make sure you use a ton of pins. I think when I took off that Finger Fairy headdress I had about 35 pins in it, because that particular role has a lot of pirouettes and some jumps, so I really really need it to be on tightly. It’s very faux-pas if a headpiece comes flying off a ballerina.”

“My favourite thing is putting on the lipstick. We tend to wear really strong, bold colours on our lips, so that’s really glamorous,” says Meiss. “The whole point is to show your facial features. In a ballet like Sleeping Beauty where there are big sets, big costumes and big feathers, you need your face to stand out against that.”

“During intermissions, because you’re changing into a different role, sometimes I like to do some different things to my eyes,” says first soloist Jordana Daubec of the National Ballet of Canada (she was prepping her makeup for her first role of the night, the Gemini Fairy). “For Bluebird, I like to use more lavenders and some more shimmer because it’s a soloist role and there’s a brighter light on me, so I like to have a little more sparkle.”

“You want to pay such close attention to the eyes so your facial expressions can be seen from the back of the orchestra. On the top lid, I do normal liner with a little bit of a wing. Then I line the inside of my eye with white liner and underneath that I do another black line. So it’s not against the actual bottom eye line but a little bit lower—it gives the illusion of a larger eye.”

“To keep my skin healthy, I use my mom’s brand [Essential Body Wisdom]: I put on the shea butter at night time and after shows, during my daytime routine I use her lighter lotion, and then before I go to sleep I use her argan oil around my eyes and wrinkly spots.”

“After doing foundation, we do a powder on top that helps set it. Basically, every time we go back upstairs, we do a little bit of powder to patch up the places that did get a bit sweaty. There’s nothing I found that keeps everything staying put through a three-act ballet.”

“For girls that have thicker hair, I always suggest wetting the hair a little bit, then I have one of those bristle brushes, so I comb the top layer that goes into the pony, then pull everything back with an elastic,” says Daumec. “To do the bun, you just twist all of your hair into a long rope and wrap it around your head. But as I wrap it around my head, I pull it tighter, so that the hair at the front of my head goes tighter.”

“I always love to use a red lipstick. Sometimes I go for more blue undertones and sometimes more orange, depending on the character, the age, if it’s a fairy or a real person. Because sometimes when you’re doing a fairy, you want to seem a little bit younger, so I want something that’s maybe not as deep. I think I was using M.A.C Ruby Woo.”

“When doing my makeup, the absolute most important thing is that the audience can see my face,” says the National Ballet of Canada’s principal character artist Rebekah Rimsay. “[Carabosse] is very angry most of the time and she’s fickle, so to be able to see the changes in my face are quite important, even though I try to express it through my body as well.”

“Often I like to have a coffee or a snack while I’m doing my makeup, and then, before I do my mouth, I’ll brush my teeth. After that, I’ll put my lipstick on and won’t eat anything else for the rest of the show so I don’t ruin my lipstick. A lot of times I’ll put sparkles and stuff on my lips. If I’m playing a human character, I wouldn’t put sparkles on. Whenever it’s anything mystical or serious, ethereal, magical, then I’m a big fan of sparkles.”

“When I do my stage makeup, the colours and everything I use are typically M.A.C. It’s a great line, especially for a character artist. I’m generally not using the typical colours most ballerinas use; I’m using more greens, more purples, more yellows, more strange things. I’m often building on a palette.”

“Usually we do our own hair, unless there’s a wig involved. If our hairstyle is typical, like any kind of bun or French roll, we do it ourselves. But some of the principal roles also have very intricate hairdos, so whenever there’s something specialized, a hairstylist will help.”

“I have to change my makeup multiple times in a show, so my favourite thing is CoverFx primer. It helps the foundation go on smoothly when my skin is dry. So often I’ll wash my face and take off my makeup at the end of the night and put that on again, because it’s so silky and feels so good.”

“This is a rough estimate, but we all get to take somewhere between 10 and 15 pairs of brand new shoes [per show] that the company will bring for us, and some of us will bring our own new shoes as well,” says Rimsay. “We tend to have a good stash, especially for Sleeping Beauty, of hard, new pointe shoes.”