How to do a smokey eye the The Batman way

polygon.com:

The hero of Matt Reeves’ The Batmanboldly does something none of his previous onscreen counterparts have done: When the cowl is off, he wears a heavy, smokey eye.

While Robert Pattinson’s darkly lined eyes certainly make for a compelling, unforgettable look, that aspect of his character design isn’t all about the aesthetic. (To be fair, it is a lot about the aesthetic.) The eye makeup has a practical purpose: Bruce Wayne needs to cover the area around his eyes in order to completely conceal his face while wearing his black cowl. Other actors playing Batman in live-action films usually also wore these raccoon eyes, but The Batman is the first to acknowledge that the illusion of darkness requires some cosmetic skills.

As makeup designer Naomi Donne tells Polygon, director Matt Reeves really wanted a makeup look that focused on how Batman looks immediately after taking off his costume.

“Matt was really keen that there were remains of [the eye makeup] when he took his cowl off,” she explains. “So we pushed that. We actually took the cowl off and looked at what was left, and we used that. It’s really hard to get black eye makeup off, and we used that.”

It was a process of trial and error, Donne says, to get that perfect blend of dark eye makeup that would look good, but also stay on. Between the film’s rainy setting, the sweaty costume, and the intense action scenes, they needed something with a lot of staying power. In the end, Batman’s perfectly calibrated emo look was a mixture of pigment, a creamy eyeliner, pencil, and a liquid paint makeup.

“And then,” she says, “to brighten it up, we used this lightly sparkly pigment to give it a bit of light, so that it reflected lights in the same way his Batsuit would’ve.”

While