20-05-2025
How ‘Bridgerton' makeup and hair designer Erika Ökvist turned Penelope in to a Hollywood siren for Season 3
Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) entered her leading lady era in Season 3 of Bridgerton and she needed to look the part.
"It's like with everything: How can we develop this character?" makeup and hair designer Erika Ökvist tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Makeup and Hair panel. "Because it's now their time. We started off with Penelope [in Season 1], maybe her hair wasn't flattering for her face. Maybe her clothes [weren't] flattering for her body. Season 2, she does what we all do as a teenager: Try out a couple of new things. Some things work, some things didn't."
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In Season 3, Penelope initially thinks she'll never be with Colin (Luke Newton) until she gets some advice from Madame Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale), realizing that she doesn't need to be anybody else but herself to be with the love of her life. "And when she then finds herself, she also finds her look because she feels confident in herself," Ökvist continues. "So that was kind of the thought process. And then we just got to find a visual language that then would work both with the show, with the character, and that would be interesting to look at for the audience because obviously they're expecting to see something new every single time we see a character onscreen."
Ökvist and Coughlan discussed Penelope's Season 3 evolution during the second season. Inspired by Coughlan's red carpet style and features, Okvist suggested they go for a Hollywood siren look for Penelope. "Her features really, really work for her skin color as well. And then, of course, like the red kind of Madonna hair that she's got."
Ökvist, who won an Emmy for Season 2, is quick to note that Bridgerton is a fantasy period series, not a pure period piece, so she and her team don't have to be completely faithful to the era. When it came to Penelope's hair, every style was designed to suit Coughlan's face and her body as much as possible.
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"If we have got a curl, you'd put the curl under the cheekbone to enhance the cheekbones. So you're almost like contouring with where you're placing the curls. And it's the same thing with if it goes down the neck, where we will have a curl just under the jawline," Ökvist explains. "It's also really deliberate on how high the hair is up, if it's up or down, depending on the scene, and what we need the scene to do for us and where she is in the story. We had about six subplots for Nicola in her visual development. And they're not, like, huge in your face, but it's something that we found and that worked really well with the story or the visual storytelling as it were."
And while Penelope's cascading fiery mane looked like a different shade of red, it was the same wig Coughlan had worn the first two seasons. The change in hue was due to the change in color of her wardrobe. Penelope was in a lot of oranges and yellows in Seasons 1 and 2. "With that color then reflecting back into red hair, it looks brighter or more vibrant, it looks like it's got more hue to it as it were," Ökvist says. In Season 3, she's in cooler shades, like blues and greens. That "calms the hue of the red down, but it is the same color. It just reads differently to camera," Okvist continues. "And that's happening a lot with camera and where somebody's wearing a certain color."
When it came to the makeup, the shift in colors allowed Penelope to wear stronger shades within the warmer spectrum. "The cooler colors of the clothes are cooling her basic look down, so we can afford to lift those colors up to a warmer vibrancy," Ökvist explains. "And then again, stepping straight away from Regency in the scene when she admits everything to the queen, she is wearing bright red lipsticks. And it works because she's wearing a pale blue, I think, dress. And if she would have been wearing a yellow or an orange one, then that would have looked really garish. And also it wouldn't have made such an impact. A bright red within that outfit just will make a very big impact."
This article and video are presented by Netflix.
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