The Skin Comes First: Siân Richards on Designing 'Sinners' Makeup

“Skin is a roadmap. It shows your blood flow, your stress, your history. Everything is mirrored there.”

Siân Richards applying fake blood to Michael B. Jordan on the Sinners set [Courtesy of Siân Richards]

For Siân Richards, the MUAH Award-nominated makeup designer behind Sinners, the most lasting memory of the film isn’t a specific effect or awards-season validation. It’s writer-director Ryan Coogler.

“Honestly, if I were to pick one golden ticket, it would be Ryan,” Richards says. “Working with Ryan is joyous. He gets so excited. He loves film. He loves the craft.”

That enthusiasm is why Sinners became a project where departments weren’t simply executing ideas but actively shaping the film’s identity. And Richards’ role was foundational. “I designed the look of the movie,” she says simply. And that design began not with fangs or scars, but with skin.

“I start with what I call the honesty of skin,” she explains. “I’ve literally coined that term.” During her historical research, one thing stood out immediately about the 1930s period: “People’s skin was beautiful. They weren’t eating junk. They had simple diets. Their skin was incredible.”

Michael B. Jordan in Sinners [Courtesy of Siân Richards]

Translating that truth to the screen was especially important given Hollywood’s long history of mishandling Black skin. “I only realized how big an issue it was when I came to the States,” Richards says. “Black audiences have felt for decades that they’re not represented properly through makeup.”

Her solution was both philosophical and technical. “Skin is a roadmap,” she says. “It shows your blood flow, your stress, your history. Everything is mirrored there.” (One look at me over Zoom and she clocked that I’ve been living like a ‘90s club kid; the woman knows what she’s talking about.) Instead of relying on off-the-shelf foundations, Richards developed her own pigment-rich silicone cream system—something she began refining years earlier while working with Chadwick Boseman.

“I couldn’t find products that gave me the pigmentation I needed,” she says. “So I started making my own cosmetics. You’re painting a face like an oil painting or a watercolor: translucent layers of pigment.”

The technique required retraining much of the local New Orleans crew. “They were used to putting one or two foundations on and being done,” Richards says. “I was like, ‘No. Throw that away. We’re starting from scratch. We’re doing a fine art course in a week.’”

The payoff came quietly, on set. Richards recalls overhearing costume designer Ruth E. Carter and production designer Hannah Beachler during an early walk-through of the Juke Joint Sequence with the cast. “I heard Ruth say, ‘Look at the skin.’ And Hannah said, ‘It’s beautiful.’” Richards never told them she heard it. “But that was the icing on the cake.”

[Courtesy of Siân Richards]

While skin formed the foundation, Sinners also required Richards to rethink vampire iconography from the ground up. “I wanted us to shift away from the classic two-bite jab on the neck,” she says. “Why do they have to kill on the neck? Why can’t they bite anywhere?” This is obvious in retrospect, but mind-blowing to hear aloud. Why have we accepted vampiric conventions for so long? To talk with Richards for any length of time is to realize how lazily we have relied on shorthand instead of treading new ground—and to desperately yearn for more conversation over cocktails.

For Richards, the bite is transformation, not punctuation. “[A vampire] should look like a lion or a hyena. Face deep into it.” The blood design, the ferocity, the physicality of the feeding—all of it was intentional.

That philosophy extended to one of the film’s most striking elements: the vampires’ reflective eyes. Coogler initially envisioned the effect digitally, but Richards pushed back. “I begged him. I said, ‘Ryan, we’ve got to do this practically. Please.’”

She brought in longtime collaborator Cristina Patterson, who had been quietly developing a new lens process for over a year. “It had never been done before in cinema,” Richards says. “We were flying by the skin of our teeth.”

What began as four sets of lenses ballooned into nine. “Once Ryan saw them, the floodgates opened,” Richards says with a laugh, though the process was grueling. “The success-to-loss ratio was very low. We were working with entirely new pigments. Christina and I were on video calls daily, talking colorways. ‘Can we add gold? Can we add silver? Can it reflect more?’”

The hallucinatory Juke Joint Scene pushed the design even further. After Coogler refined the scene in rewrites, Richards responded with layered historical references. When she realized Bo Chow lacked an ancestor in the sequence, she saw opportunity.

“I asked Yao, ‘If you could choose any figure from Chinese mythology, who would it be?’” Richards says. “He said Monkey King. I already had it on my board.”

She took the idea to Coogler directly, who told her, “As long as it doesn’t cost me more money, you can do it.” (That’s a good leader.) Richards handed development to her assistant department head, Ned Neidhardt, who mapped and executed the look. “Those areas are foundational,” she says. “They shape the entire movie.”

{Courtesy of Sian Richards]

Throughout pre-production, Richards’ mood boards became visual anchors. “ Ryan said that he saw his movie when he saw my mood boards. He suddenly realized what it could look like,” she says. “That was from the very first board.  It had sharecroppers. It had Chinese immigrants, it had Chicago gangsters, it had lions, hyenas, and dead elephants. He could see the people, see the energy, right? It gave him something to really work towards, especially in the early stages when we hadn’t started filming and we were still working round the clock to bring this to reality.”

At its core, Sinners was never just a genre exercise. As Richards recalls, “I told Ryan, ‘Please stop calling it a vampire movie. This is a drama. We are in the deep south in the 1930s, we can’t play here. We can only address this like a classic piece of filmmaking and be absolutely correct in all of our historical choices.’”

Sinners [Warner Bros.]

Later, Coogler told Richards she saw more in the script than he did at the time, but Richards points out that’s what his team is for. “A few of us did, it wasn’t just me. I think Ruth was there too. And that’s why you have us, right? We're your wingmen, your ride or dies. We can be so grounding and give him stuff that he might not think. And by return, the way Ryan sees things is so brilliant that he actually sheds new light on things and enables us to see something new as well. It is a completely yin and yang harmony.”

By the end of the shoot, Richards felt something rare had happened. “My purpose is to make people feel seen,” she says. “And it worked.” The messages came quickly, with viewers reaching out to thank her for seeing them through her work. “That breaks my heart,” Richards says. “But it also tells me we did something right.”

Awards or not, she believes Sinners has already won. “People don’t see it once,” she says. “They see it nine or 10 times. That tells you everything.”

Sian Richards is an Emmy- and MUAH-nominated makeup artist whose credits include Bessie, Black Panther, and the 2025 The Naked Gun.