In ‘You Can See Everything,’ Elizabeth Holmes Introduces a New Version of Herself—but Is It Real?

When you picture “Elizabeth Holmes makeup,” what do you see? Red lipstick, smeared smokey eyes, and a thick coat of mascara, all framed by her bleach-blonde hair in a slightly undone bun. “Once you repeat a look often enough, it stops being makeup and becomes identity, whether you planned it or not,” says film and TV makeup artist Stephanie Pasicov, who (spoiler alert) did the makeup for Amanda Seyfried’s cameo in You Can See Everything, the new A24 documentary about Holmes. And it’s still working, evidently. Just think of all the black turtlenecks and red lips you’ll see on your timeline this weekend (complete with someone’s partner being Nathan Fielder, of course).But her signature look is notably absent from the documentary, which follows Holmes 34 days before she’s sent to prison. Her hair is down, and the red lip and liner are gone. There’s hardly any trace of makeup at all, and her skin is “nearly stripped bare,” according to New York-based film and TV makeup artist Sarah Graalman. All we see is a touch of liner, her ginormous blue eyes, the natural flush of her cheeks, and “those dang clumped-together lashes,” as makeup artist Erin Chaney puts it. Her hair is out of the bun, but still a bit disheveled, signaling “an air of relatability that she had been lacking,” says hairstylist and wig artist Jamie Amadio. “On screen, it communicates a woman under enormous strain,” says Pasicov.The drastic change in her appearance is one of the most obvious examples of the question Fielder is hinting at with the whole film: Is this the latest character Holmes is playing, or just a mother of two kids with 34 days left before prison?Is this the latest character Holmes is playing, or just a mother of two kids with 34 days left before prison?Potentially, she’s expressing two very different types of femininity, says Graalman. If the red-lipped Holmes was an iteration of the “femme fatale,” now we get a version of what Graalman calls “earth-mother-feminine.” She swapped the red lipstick for lip balm, the bun for unbrushed hair. Makeup artist Taylour Chanel similarly associates the red lip with an “empowered femininity,” while the natural look in You Can See Everything has a more innate “divine femininity.” Pasicov sees the same message in both versions of Holmes: “Both say, ‘Take me seriously.’ She has changed the presentation, not the message.”Is she just wearing the version that is most likely to be believed? “Every public figure makes a choice about how the public sees them, even if it’s an unconscious choice,” Graalman later points out. Could this character of Holmes be appealing more to women than the red-lipped, vest-wearing version we were introduced to in The Dropout? It’s possible. A 2018 study found that women thought other women who wore makeup to be less trustworthy. By stripping down her look, celebrity makeup artist and beauty influencer Jamie Greenberg says Holmes could be conveying a kind of “innocent beauty” that “gives off the impression that she has nothing to hide.”A makeup artist couldn’t have designed her makeup de-transformation better.It’s hard not to wonder at this point whether the change is intentional to garner sympathy. I mean, her bare skin is the perfect canvas for a tear to roll dramatically down her face as she sits across from Fielder. “I think we would be fools to think it’s not a deliberate choice,” says Chanel. “If it’s purely intentionally manipulative,” Graalman adds, “she did a great job.” If this were a fictional tale, “a makeup artist couldn’t have designed her makeup de-transformation better.”But Holmes’s decision to go barefaced could just be related to her pivot to motherhood and falling in love with her partner Billy Evans, a main character in the documentary. “Some people get attached to looks that don’t suit them at all, and you can chalk it up to their personal social circles or a warped self-image, or just being convinced that men won’t be attracted to them without a certain style of makeup,” says Chaney. “I’d caution against confusing a deliberate—but bizarre—makeup look with a 4D chess-level con artist.”With Holmes, “we can never really know for sure,” Pasicov adds. As for what’s next, Holmes isn’t out yet, and her projected release date is August 2027. Whatever look she lands on then, we’ll have to look closely to see everything—or anything at all.