Kat Dennings Could Teach a Master Class in Makeup Removal

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Kat Dennings loves — loves — to talk about beauty. This is not merely an observation, even though it was abundantly clear when I talked to her recently; this is an admission. “Beauty’s kind of like my favorite thing,” she tells me, followed by the five little words that serve as the secret handshake among those of us who became enamored of makeup before we were allowed to wear it: Making Faces by Kevyn Aucoin. Turns out we both got the legendary book, which she credits with changing her brain chemistry forever, as a Hanukkah gift in the mid-’90s. “The looks he did, like making people look like other people by changing your eyebrow shape or your lip shape or whatever, and all his diagrams on different lip liners — I mean, the whole thing made me obsessed with makeup.”

So it was a little strange that the first two drugstore products that came up in our chat weren’t, say, mascara and shampoo, but rather topical pain-relieving foam and Scotch tape. For nearly a week before our phone conversation, Dennings was tormented by an especially obstinate migraine that had finally lifted that morning. “I know we’re talking about beauty products, but shoutout to Biofreeze foam,” she says. We’ll come back to the tape later.

Dennings has been talking to journalists and fans cleverly disguised as journalists (hello, it is I, the latter of the two) about the second season of Dollface (premiering February 11), in which she continues to play Jules, one of the most relatable characters in Hulu’s vast array of streaming entertainment. Even Dennings relates to her — at least in terms of her makeup, which is very much in sync with the actor’s own signature look.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that I love a cat eye. That’s my thing. And yeah, so does Jules. It’s weird how that happens,” Dennings says. Dollface’s head makeup artist, Cheryl Calo, applies Jules’s go-to false lashes — which breaks from Dennings’s real-life makeup routine — but Dennings insists on applying her cat eye herself for filming. “It’s controversial because I know that many makeup artists are amazing at it. It’s just that I know my eyes so well, and I can do it in three seconds,” she explains. “Also, I wear contacts, and I get really scared having things really close to my eyes.”