Stripper rhinestones and French bobs: the best A24 film beauty looks

The film company behind ZOLA, Spring Breakers, and Midsommar might just be moving into beauty officially, but A24 has always delivered the looks

14May 2021

Last week, rumours started swirling that the arthouse film production company A24 was following in the footsteps of, well, everyone and making moves into the beauty sphere with its own brand named Rules Beauty.

Rules Beauty – could it be a portmanteau of A24’s Euphoria lead characters Rue and Jules? – has been described as “a new A24 portfolio company focusing on the beauty space”. And, for now, that’s pretty much all we know. So, until more details come to light, we are left to our own devices to imagine what an A24 beauty brand might look like. It will certainly take risks. It will conduct itself with style, humour, and, yes, panache. It will be aesthetically pleasing with an instinct for cool. It will, above all, be authentic and bold. Lurid neon colours will almost certainly be involved.

While Rules Beauty will mark the company’s first official dealings with the beauty industry, A24 films have a long history of delivering standout hair and make-up looks starting right from its beginnings with Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, contemporary cult hit Midsommar, and the forthcoming viral stripper story ZOLA. And this is, after all, the production company behind Euphoria we are talking about. So while we eagerly await to see what Rules Beauty will turn out to be, we’ve revisited some of the best beauty looks from across A24 films for your pleasure and edification.

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ZOLA

We’re starting with the most anticipated movie of this year – Zola – because even though it isn’t out yet from the trailer we can already tell the looks are going to be sick as fuck.

Directed by Janicza Bravo and co-written by Slave Play playwright Jeremy O’Harris, Zola is based on a viral Twitter thread that tells the story of a weekend of debauchery that quickly descends into a hellish whirlwind of sex, murder, and near-suicide.

Taylour Paige and Riley Keough star as the two mains, Zola and Stefani respectively, and rock great beauty looks throughout the film. There is statement hair and stiletto nails, there are matching eye and lip looks, there is the culturally-appropriative but character-appropriate cornrows, and there are heaps of rhinestones and glitter.

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SPRING BREAKERS

From A24’s next big hit we move to the film that put it on the map: Spring Breakers. A fluro fever dream of a film, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers follows a group of girls who rob a restaurant to fund their spring break in Florida, get involved with James Franco’s Riff Raff-inspired Alien, and descend into debauched chaos.

When their heads weren’t covered by fluro balaclavas, the characters in Spring Breakers really deliver on memorable beauty looks. With his beaded-cornrows, grills, and dodgy facial hair that he pairs with Haiwaiin shirts and pinky rings, Franco’s Alien was the forefather of the sleaze-chic trend that reared its ugly head five years later. Meanwhile, Cotty, played by Korine’s wife Rachel, sports the ultimate neon pastel pink hair complete with dark roots.

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EIGHTH GRADE + LADY BIRD

I’m going to cheat a bit with this one but it is my list, so I’m allowed. Sometimes the boldest beauty looks are the ones that involve no make-up at all, as we saw in two A24 films: Eighth Grade and Lady Bird.

Hormonal breakouts are pretty much a given during the long and painful teenage years and yet, for something experienced so universally, they are so rarely portrayed on screen. With high-school characters on television and films more often than not portrayed by actors, polished and glossy, long out of the teen years themselves, we seldom get to see the true everyday pimply reality of what adolescent skin really looks like.

Eighth Grade and Lady Bird changed that. Actresses Elsie Fisher and Saoirse Ronan both were allowed to be seen with breakouts – a refreshing and welcome change, and one that marked a shift in the landscape of acne representation in the media.

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EUPHORIA

From minimalism to the highs of make-up maximalism we move next to Euphoria. What is there left to say about the make-up of that show? A veritable visual feast for the beauty enthusiast’s eyes, the looks Doniella Davy created on Euphoria were game-changing and industry-shifting, truly capturing and defining the aesthetic of a generation.

Colourful, bejewelled, and over-the-top, the make-up spanned sky blue eyelids with chainmail applique to rhinestone-studded eyebrows, casually worn geometric face stickers to glitter tears. From Jules’s (Hunter Schafer) colourful, whimsical lid designs to Kat’s (Barbie Ferreira) dominatrix-infused makeover, the beauty played an integral role in the identity of each and every character.

It’s hard to remember the last time a television programme had as big a cultural impact on beauty as the first season of Euphoria had and Davy and her team’s Emmy win for Outstanding Contemporary Makeup was truly deserved.

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THE FLORIDA PROJECT

Sean Baker’s The Florida Project tells the story of six-year-old Moonee and her green-haired, weed-smoking, heavily tattooed single mum Halley who are living on the fringes of Walt Disney World in a rundown motel called Magic Castle.

Seen through the eyes of Moonee, the film is awash with candy colours and sherbet shades – mint greens, egg yolk yellows, pastel purples, hot pinks, and Florida skies blues. Fittingly seamlessly into this dreamy aesthetic is Halley’s hair.

At first glance, Halley’s turquoise hair looks as rose-tinted as the rest of the colour palette of the film but the sherbet hue cannot for long distract from the inches-wide roots of her unmaintained dye-job. Equally the candy-coloured settings of Kissimmee, Florida only briefly hides the grim reality of poverty and struggle experienced by America’s mistreated and overlooked underclass.

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MID90S + CLIMAX

Before she played Euphoria’s rhinestonned Maddy, Alexa Demie appeared in Jonah Hill's directorial debutMid90s, a nostalgic coming-of-age film following a group of LA skate punks. Playing the character Estee, Demie sports a so-chic-it-could-be-French sleek black bob which she styles with two purple clips.

Another great bob, this time authentically French, appears in Gaspar Noé’s trippy descent into a psychedelic nightmare, Climax. Portrayed by Thea Carla Schott, Psyche is one of the dancers-gone-wild with a brilliant blonde bob. It’s short and tightly cropped with a sharp fringe and small curls in front of her ears. Très Chic.

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