Character Study: Donni Davy breaks down the beauty psychology of Euphoria

I t is 12:30 am in India when I log onto Zoom for what feels like a full circle moment. I find myself thinking about being 18, spending an unreasonable amount of time trying to match my eyeshadow to my blouse like Maddy Perez in Euphoria (2019-) while the show is running in the background. Seven years later as we all gear up for the third season, I find myself waiting for Doniella Davy, the make-up artist of the show who made all of it happen. 

Known almost universally as Donni, she comes on screen from Los Angeles. She is fully awake and unhurried. Davy is a two-time Emmy winner and the founder of Half Magic Beauty, a brand that within two years of its launch had $87 million in earned media value and shelf space in over 800 Ulta stores.

Those numbers make more sense when you consider what the preceding decade had done to beauty culture. From roughly 2012 onwards, the dominant aesthetic logic was one of construction—the Kim Kardashian contour era, in which the face became something to be architecturally remapped rather than simply expressed (baking powder anyone?). YouTube had industrialised the whole enterprise. By 2018, an entire generation had come of age and was beginning, without quite having the language for it yet, to find it suffocating. The ground was already moving before Euphoria arrived. What the show did was give that restlessness a face, a language, and a direction to follow.

None of it was planned, Davy tells me. She still gets messages from people who say they never touched makeup before the show. “That keeps me going. That’s what I love,” she admits. 

But numbers rarely explain resonance, and Davy is more interested in the part that genuinely surprised her— not the reach, but the depth of understanding that came with it. “It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, the glitter looks cool’,” she says. “People understood the why behind everything—the colour choices, the emotional undertones, the intention. That was incredibly rewarding as an artist, to communicate something and have the audience truly get it.”

The instinct to look for meaning beneath the surface is also something that is shaped over time by her journey. Long before the scale of this moment, she tells me, she was someone who actively avoided being seen. “I struggled with severe cystic acne, which was difficult as a make-up artist. I didn’t want to be on camera at all,” she says.

Even as her work grew, she kept herself in the background, resisting the pull of visibility that came with it. The shift, when it came, was gradual but deliberate. “Eventually, I had to push myself out of that comfort zone. But that definitely shaped my relationship with beauty and self-image.”

Davy’s artistry crossed geography and demographics in a way beauty references rarely do. Audiences in South Asia, India, and countries with no particular prior relationship with the American Gen Z culture found something in it that felt like theirs. When I ask if she had anticipated any of that, she is unambiguous. “No, never.” She thinks it through for a moment. “Part of it was that the show was on a mainstream platform like HBO, which gave it reach. But beyond that, it wasn’t just the make-up—it was the combination of music, performances, writing, and iconic moments. Together, it created something that resonated across cultures, ages, and even with people who aren’t into make-up at all.”

What made the depth possible, she thinks, was context— specifically, the radical absence of perfection in it. “The looks were worn by flawed, emotional characters in real situations, not perfect beauty lighting.” She adds how the show put maximalist beauty on people who were actively falling apart, who made terrible decisions, sweated through parties, and cried in car parks. “People saw themselves in these characters and wanted to embody that through makeup,” she says. “Almost like trying on different versions of yourself.”

Before Euphoria, Davy built her career on realism— Moonlight (2016), If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)—where make-up is measured by its invisibility, by how completely it disappears into a person’s truth. She was trained, in other words, in the exact opposite of what the show would eventually ask of her. When Sam Levinson’s brief arrived— make it really special and expressive—she had no ready framework. So she constructed one from the inside out, she tells me.

“It’s more head-to-toe glam—eyes, lips, face, body, nails. It’s almost like a response to the clean girl aesthetic.

“I always start from within rather than looking at external references,” she says. “I read the scripts closely, think about the characters, and build their emotional and psychological world.”

She describes how she decided Kat’s (played by Barbie Ferreira) signature colour would be green—not blue, the predictable non-neutral, not pink, too feminine. Green because it felt experimental enough to match who Kat actually was.

From there, Davy moved to costumes, through wardrobe racks per character. Then production design— the bedrooms, sometimes the blueprints before the sets have been built, because she wants the make-up to feel like it belongs in that specific room rather than being imposed onto it. “I collaborate with the costume team and observe sets and environments,” she says. “I want the make-up to feel like it belongs in that world.”

That attention to the environment carries directly into how she approaches character and emotion. Throughout her work, makeup operates as emotional storytelling. She points out how Rue’s (Zendaya’s character) glitter tears in the bedroom fort scene are not real within the world of the show, but hallucinated—a visual translation of the feeling Rue has spent her whole life waiting to feel, placed on screen just before her overdose. “That’s pure emotional storytelling,” she says simply. “Every look serves a narrative purpose.”

The same philosophy extends to other characters, too. “Jules’ (played by Hunter Schafer) looks were constantly shifting with her emotions, from whimsical to anxious,” Davy says. “Her make-up felt otherworldly, which aligned with how she’s perceived by Rue,” she adds.

Season two was a deliberate contraction. The shift came not from personal instinct but from Levinson, who arrived on set and said he didn’t want “Euphoria make-up”—meaning the version of it that had already calcified into cultural shorthand, the look being recreated globally in videos captioned with the show’s name. “We didn’t want to repeat what worked in season one,” she says. “As artists, we wanted to evolve.”

Looking back now, she finds the season less toned-down than it felt at the time. “It just felt more refined and intentional,” she says. “Smaller details, subtler elements that revealed themselves up close.”

Season three reads as both creative evolution and considered rebuttal. “It’s more head-to-toe glam—eyes, lips, face, body, nails,” she says. “It’s almost like a response to the clean girl aesthetic.” Rumours say glitter has been abandoned, based on early trailers that looked more restrained than expected. Davy addresses this with some amusement. “There’s still glitter, despite what people might think from early glimpses. I can’t do a modern show without it. But overall, it leans more toward high glam with a cheeky—my version of that.” Now, as she steps further into roles beyond the set—founder, educator, storyteller—Davy is thinking about impact in a broader sense. She wants make-up to be accessible, creative, and open to everyone. There’s also a new project on the horizon, one she’s keeping under wraps for now, but which promises to reimagine glamour in yet another context.

When our conversation circles back to what comes next—what it feels like to release something this anticipated into the world, Davy says, “Of course, I’m excited (and nervous) for people to watch season three. I’m a sensitive creative, so I care deeply about how it’s received.”

Images: Courtesy Doniella Davy; Instagram/HBO; IMDb

This article first appeared in the April 2026 issue of Harper's Bazaar India  

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