Hair
Lili Reinhart's Love Hypothesis Brunette Hair Was Two Wigs, Not Dye
Lili Reinhart's brunette Olive Smith in The Love Hypothesis wasn't dye — it was two custom wigs. Hair chief Frédéric Bélanger details the bronde shade tests, wig-y pitfalls and facelift tugging.
Lili Reinhart never dyed her hair to play Olive Smith in The Love Hypothesis. The brunette audiences see on screen is the work of two custom wigs, built by hair department head Frédéric Bélanger and wigmaker Stacey Butterworth.
Reinhart spent six years on screens as golden-blonde Betty Cooper on Riverdale, so expectations ran high when the Prime Video adaptation cast her as the protagonist of Ali Hazelwood's best-selling romance. "Everybody has a picture in their head," Bélanger says of how readers imagine the characters.
Finding the Right Brunette
"Everybody wanted to turn Lili into a brunette," Bélanger says. Getting the shade right took multiple attempts. "We had to choose a level of brunette that wasn't so dark that it looked shocking," he says.
The process began with a mood board built around readers' expectations. On the book's cover, the character's hair reads as a red- or warm brown, according to Bélanger. The team tested that exact hue, plus honey and chestnut browns, before landing "somewhere that sits between dark blonde and light brown" — bronde, by Allure's shorthand.
Butterworth then molded Reinhart's head and installed the hair strand by strand into the wig base.
Beating the "Wig-y" Look
Bélanger knew viewers would scrutinize the hairline once they learned a wig was involved. "We had to think about the hairline, the density—all the details that will make a difference," he says. "Sometimes it can look wig-y. I think everybody was so concerned from the get-go with that."
To keep the wigs believable on camera, the pair wove in different-colored strands for dimension after test-fitting them on Reinhart. They also added lighter, fluffy strands throughout that caught the air easily, so the hair behaved like natural hair in heat and humidity — and on a girl watching her (ripped) fake boyfriend play ultimate Frisbee.
Hiding Reinhart's naturally thick hair underneath required pulling it "very, very, very tight," Bélanger says, though "not in a way that would hurt her." The tugging sometimes dragged the perimeter of her face. "She would be like, 'Fred, you're giving me a facelift. People will think I have a facelift,'" he recalls, laughing. He loosened the fit. "She was really mindful of me not doing that."
Once secured with U-shaped pins, the wig's part was blended using Kryolan Dermacolor Camouflage Creme, color-matched to Reinhart's scalp.
Hair as Character Work
Olive is a STEM student buried in library hours, and Bélanger styled accordingly. "Olive is not the perfect girl," he says. "She's a student. Students are overwhelmed. We wanted the hair to look like it could be lived in."
When Olive watches Love Island with her best friend Anne, her hair looks freshly washed and unstyled. "You're in pajamas with your best friend eating popcorn and chocolate," Bélanger says. "Nobody cares." He adds: "We worked the hair in a way that it would intentionally look like she did it herself."
The party scene follows the same logic. Olive wears a beautiful red dress, but the styling stays modest. "Maybe she didn't go to the hairdresser because she's a student. Maybe Anne did it for her," he says.
Tom Bateman's Dr. Adam Carlsen undergoes his own arc through grooming. "At the beginning, his hair was a bit stiffer," Bélanger says. "You really see the progression of him loosening up and being more willing to be warmer. The hair translated that."
The Fanfiction Ripple Effects
The Love Hypothesis originated as Star Wars fanfiction about Kylo Ren and Rey, played by Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. That lineage shaped decisions. "They created these characters thinking of these two other characters, so it had a repercussion in our decisions," Bélanger says — including keeping Bateman bearded, since the "Dr. Evil" on the book cover (drawn with Driver's likeness) is clean-shaven.
"You need to always question how he is going to feel being completely clean-shaven," Bélanger says. "Because you always want people to relate and to fall in love with him as well."
Ridley is married to Bateman, and Bélanger says the production tried to use that connection. "I know that they tried to have Daisy play a little part in there just for fans," he says. "For whatever reason it didn't work out."
For the cover's first-kiss scene, Bélanger built a chignon echoing the cover art's silhouette, but woven like a bow — a detail fans of the novel will clock. "The cover of the book is how you enter a story," he says.
Original: instagram.com
Grace Kim
Show full bio
Correspondent covering media and advertising at Eurasian Beauty Journal.
