SERVING FACE

HAIR AND MAKE-UP DESIGNER CLAIRE WILLIAMS ON NEW LOOKS

- DARREN SCOTT

Tell us about the look for Ncuti’s Doctor.

I had worked with Ncuti before – I did season one of Sex Education. So he was a known quantity, we’re good friends. As well as giving us a little bit of scope to be a bit more adventurous and playful in a way that’s suited to his personality, I wanted to do something a little bit more interesting. So we started looking at nail tattoos. Then I was looking at some of the symbols in the Gallifreyan alphabet.

Obviously, they’re too big to fit on a fingernail, because they’re quite elaborate and quite large. So we just took elements and adapted them and shrunk them to size. We just put them on like a normal tattoo. They’re water transfer tattoos and then we seal them with a matte nail varnish.

I always remember when we were doing Sex Ed that Ncuti said he wanted to be bleach blond. I said, “We’ll do it one day” and of course, Barbie beat me to it. So I just thought, “Well, what about a really, really, really dark blue, like the colour of the night sky?” It was like the colour of the galaxy, if you like, a midnight blue. Sometimes it picks up, it depends on the lighting or the scene that we’re shooting, and sometimes you can’t tell, it has to be lit for it to show.