Hair & Make-up

Outfits . Hair & Make-up . Tetsuya Nomura

Not everyone can do this to their natural hair or wear the same make-up colours but I'll do my best to explain what Rinoa's design uses. Since she looks rather plain, some may find it hard to believe that her character has make-up on. If you look closely at the FMVs and artwork, you'll find that she is indeed wearing some!

Rinoa's Hairstyle

Rinoa's hair is in a constant hairstyle throughout the game. The colour is dark brown, almost black. The original concept drawing of her is how it's really meant to look. In the game, everything loses detail and in the CG renders it looks hard and stiff.

There are two main parts. First there's the front half, where her hair is parted closer to the middle. She has a thick set of bangs, most on the left side and they fall to just below her eyebrows. Also on her left side, there is shaping that begins where her bangs end. On the right side, the shaping starts at a lower point.

I suggest using hairwax or pomades rather than gel because it keeps naturally thick and straight hair in place and easy to style. Unless your hair has a ton of volume with the same texture, chances are you will have to blowdry your hair with a round brush in the opposite direction and then use a ceramic flat iron to shape it. Don't forget heat protectants!

Then there's the back half. This half is actually parted further from the middle than the front half. The parting starts two inches or so from her forehead and the rest of her hair is allowed to fall straight towards her back. The bottom of the hair has an inward flip, use a blow dryer or flat iron, curling inwards to get that effect. The hair is chopped straight across here and the length ends just at her shoulderblades. In reality people get their hair cut with a soft angle at the back and more layering, as it gets too thick and puffy when cut straight.

If you want to do the highlights I suggest not getting it bleached and dyed unless your colourist knows exactly what you're going for. Carefully applied hair mascara or wefts on a wig are much easier and cheaper ways to do it. Rinoa only has three streaks on each side in the FMV renders but in all the high-res commercial CG art or drawings, many of her bangs have been highlighted. In my case, I had my colourist darken my hair while carefully adding the highlighted layers throughout.

Rinoa's Make-up

Rinoa wears a vibrant orange-pink, almost coral coloured lipstick in the actual game and on most of the official dolls. Since the lipcolour shines in the high-res CG artwork, she uses a gloss. Her bow (the top lip) is overly defined in the FMVs and in certain lighting the lipcolour appears more purplish.

Her eyes are lined with a thick black line across her lids and a thinner black line on the bottom. Both lines don't connect, they taper off at the inner corner of her eye. Note that the lines are not extended to be catlike. If you're trying this look, a dark brown liner would be less harsh and cartoony.

She has a pair of full dark brown brows, slightly lighter than her haircolour, with a rounded arch. This look was chosen so that her expression could still be seen from far away in the FMVs. Instead, fill in your eyebrows with a dark brown eyebrow pencil or products specifically meant for the eyebrow area.

For eyelashes, only in the high-res CG artwork her sparse eyelashes have some mascara or some black falsies on. Also only in the high-res CGs, she has some eyeshadow on lids and crease.

The game's FMV didn't have any realistic facial definition going on beyond shape of face and colours. The lighting angles were specifically chosen to have the least amount of ill-placed shadows. This means she rarely has any shadows on her face despite her eyes being deeply sunken in - something impossible in everyday lighting.

If you really want a character-like face, the only way to do it is with foundation and primer. Once you have an evenly coloured skin tone, skip the blush (she doesn't have any) and use contouring to define shadows. Most of her contouring is along the sides of her nose.

Unfortunately, in the FMVs she has no nail colour at all. It seems the team neglected to colour that in and it looks icky! On one of the scenes during the intro, it looks like her nails are slightly longer than natural but not painted.