Elmer’s Glue, Aquaphor, and Museum Putty: Behind the Beauty of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’
Beauty
Jennifer Lopez’s long-time makeup artist, Scott Barnes, and manicurist, Elle Gerstein, discuss how they created fall’s most hotly anticipated musical thriller.
Originally a 70s Argentinian-Spanish novel of the same name by Manuel Puig, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” was adapted for the screen a decade later, and after that came a Broadway musical. Now in its fourth iteration, the story graces screens in 2025 as a musical thriller, with a whole host of movie-defining beauty looks to sink your teeth into.
The story follows two cellmates, Valentin (Diego Luna) and Luis (Tonatiuh), in an Argentine prison during a time of political unrest. In a bid to escape their bleak reality, Luis begins recounting stories of his favourite movie star, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez). What follows is a series of fantastical tales, featuring impressive musical numbers, dances and costumes that are starkly cut between harrowing prison flashbacks.
Jennifer Lopez in in "Kiss of the Spider Woman". Courtesy Of Roadside Attractions.
Throughout these escapist tales, Lopez plays three different iterations of the same woman, all with very different beauty looks: Ingrid Luna, the Hollywood Starlet; Aurora, the vampy diva; and lastly, the Spider Woman, a deathly but alluring seductress. Ahead, Lopez’s trusted nail technician Elle Gerstein and makeup artist Scott Barnes talk to The Set Set about their on-set beauty secrets.
Ingrid Luna: The Hollywood Starlet
To understand the beauty looks,first we must understand how the film was created. Shot in Technicolor, this “means that you have to push the film and then saturate it later,” says Barnes. “So, if you’re using pinks or reds on the cheeks, it’s going to triple in tone and look like firecrackers on the face.” With this in mind, Lopez’s skin work was purposefully sculptural, rather than colorful.
Ingrid is icy blonde, a fact that posed its own set of challenges. “Here we had [Jennifer] with golden skin and then platinum blonde hair — there had to be a lot of adjustment.” These adjustments were made by underpainting, which means creating dimension using contouring products, blushers and highlighters underneath your base makeup. Yet, in a bid to remain on-period, Barnes was careful not to go overboard as he chiselled away at Lopez’s skin. “There’s nothing worse than when you see a period film and the makeup looks modern — nothing takes you out of it more.”
As a character, Barnes describes Ingrid Luna as being “very buttoned up,” and so he kept the use of bold blush or eyeshadow colors to a minimum. “There wasn’t a lot of anything. There was a tightness to her and I kept everything super controlled.” Even her hair and clothes were pulled tighter. Of all the looks, this first character was the most austere. In this same vein, Gerstein used nude nails for the character, courtesy of medium almond Aprés Gel-X nail tips in the shade ‘Maisie’. These tips served as the foundation for her next look, allowing for a nail evolution, of sorts.
Aurora: The Fabulous Diva
Aurora bursts onto the screen with subtle, but important, differences to Ingrid Luna. “Aurora is a little bit looser and wilder — her hair is down and she’s a fabulous dancer,” says Barnes. Her skin was still pared back and pale to the naked eye (“Jennifer is so used to being warm, but I was like, ‘Jennifer's sleeping right now. Aurora is here,’” Barnes jokes); a custom red lip from Scott Barnes Cosmetics lifted the complexion.
For this look, Barnes took inspiration from Rita Hayworth in the 1946 film noir classic, “Gilda.”. “As Aurora, Jennifer’s hair was free, which loosened up the brief for me: I made [the makeup] more colorful, a little more creamy and dreamy.” Being Aurora was very physically demanding of Lopez, and her makeup had to last throughout 14-hour days of dancing, singing, and sweating.. “It’s difficult, because we can’t re-do the makeup all day long like we would for a [concert] performance, when you just wash the face off and do it again.” To prevent Lopez’s under-eyes from looking “crusty-dusty”, Barnes applied Aquaphor underneath her concealer. “This way, it stayed pliable for hours, it stayed moist and didn’t wrinkle.”
He also used Maybelline Superstay Powder and COTY Airspun Loose Face Powder to keep everything in place. Though discontinued, you can still grab the latter on Amazon. “You can’t use it on a red carpet because of the flashback, and it has talc in it,” explains Barnes. “But I used it because it was from the time period that we were recreating.” As a fan and collector of vintage Halston makeup formulas, which often featured oils, Barnes felt inspired to use oil-based complexion products on Aurora.. He did this because oil-based foundations sometimes oxidise less, which means the color shouldn’t darken or separate throughout the day.
As for Lopez’s nails, Gerstein opted for a reverse-moon design, which was popular in the 40s and 50s, in an authentic red hue. “We picked that classic Coca-Cola red,” she notes. “It couldn’t be too blue, it couldn’t be too orange. Back then, you didn’t have different reds to choose from.” Lopez never broke a nail, but Gerstein always had spare nails on standby and seeing these rows upon rows of red-dipped tips behind the scenes, it’s easy to see how she was inspired by Revlon’s 1953 “Cherries in the Snow” advertisement. “I actually have these [vintage advertisements] hanging in my salon. I have a lot of old Christian Dior ads,” she adds.
The Spider Woman: The Deathly Seductress
After two fairly tame beauty looks, the Spider Woman was when Barnes and Gerstein brought in playful experimentation. “I made sure that [her] skin was really moist-looking, like a bug,” explains Barnes. “There was a sheen on the skin. I thought, ‘What would a spider look like if it was alive?’” To achieve this, he played with a few tools – from an airbrush to opalescent powders – and he landed on a beetle-like sheen using highlighters from his own cosmetics line. “Sometimes you see bugs in pictures and they're so beautiful because they're so bizarre-looking,” adds Barnes. ”This is the very feeling he wanted to encapsulate in the Spider Woman, who’s addictively attractive despite her deathly disposition.”
As for the brows, Barnes took inspiration from the drag scene. He thinned them using purple Elmer’s Glue, which he carefully spread over her hair with a palette knife and covered with foundation before carving brows on top. On her lips, he chose “the darkest vampy cherry you can imagine” with bucketloads of gloss to boot, because she’s venomous.
Jennifer Lopez and Tonatiuh in "Kiss Of The Spider Woman." Courtesy Of Roadside Attractions.
Gerstein’s approach was similarly fantastical. Think: triple-XL tips peeking out of mesh, web-like gloves. After finding out how expensive these gloves were, Gerstein began experimenting with pantyhose tights until landing on her final, most practical design idea: to cut the precious gloves and stick the long, claw-like nails to Lopez’s actual fingertips. This sounds simple enough, but wearing such long nails didn’t come naturally to Lopez, and her own nail beds were short. This meant there wasn’t much for the fake nails to grip onto, especially as they were so long and curved, leaving a gaping space between the real nails and the fake ones. To combat this, she attached them using clear museum putty from Amazon which worked perfectly. Without this, “the nails would have just kept flipping off,” Gerstein says
The nail art itself was a darker iteration of Aurora’s half moons. “I basically took that look and then made it darker” she explains. Her inspiration came from the costume designer, Colleen Atwood: “When I saw the dress, I went straight to Halloween in my head”. This led to a more-is-more approach, and she drenched the nails in cat eye polishes (which shimmer with movement) as well as flash formulas, which show up as intense glitter particles under lights.
After all of this work on her makeup and nails, Lopez was sufficiently equipped to become an otherworldly being. At the end of each filming day, she would ask Barnes for a steaming hot towel, which he’d dutifully provide fresh from a microwave, and she’d rub the Spider Woman off like a reptile shedding its skin – leaving just Lopez behind. As sad as it is, imagining all of this work being swiped off with a cloth, the Spider Woman is forever immortalized for you to see on-screen.
