Amid growing buzz surrounding comedian Nathan Fielder’s new documentary, “You Can See Everything,” which follows his move into Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ home just days before she was set to begin her 11-year prison sentence, several people took it upon themselves to deliver their best impression of the former billionaire for Halloween.
Online, videos of women — and the occasional man — dressed in black turtlenecks, tangled blond wigs, charcoal eyes and matte lips interrupted what would otherwise have been a steady stream of devils, witches, Priscilla Presleys and Dolly Partons. While many filmed their Holmes impersonations set to viral sound bites from Fielder’s film or scenes from the Amanda Seyfried-starring Hulu drama “The Dropout,” others shared how they recreated her makeup — the look she wore in her heyday, that is.
Before Holmes was convicted on three counts of fraud in 2022, she was known to wear her frayed blond ends down or in a low-effort bun with short, straightened layers slipping out. She was also famously devoted to a deep side part, sweeping half her hair across her head to expose dark roots — a part so pronounced it looked ready for a scalp check.
Holmes also often paired a heavy eye with a bold lip. Press interviews, covers and red carpets from 2013 to 2015 featured Holmes with overdrawn red lipstick, smoky shadow, a touch of glitter under her brows, thick mascara and buffed-out black eyeliner with a C-curve wing tip that was almost impossible to miss. The look was similar to that of Susan Dell‘s — the wife of Michael S. Dell, chief executive officer of Dell Technologies — who recently went viral for her “frozen face” inside the Oval Office. It was the kind of aesthetic you can only assume she drew herself.
Of course now, with Holmes behind bars, her charcoal eyes and blood red lips are no more. In fact, she’d already begun shedding these makeup habits in the years and months leading to her incarceration. Photos of her entering and exiting the courthouse for her sentencing three years ago show her with a naked face, and in Fielder’s “You Can’t See Everything,” she’s seen with only mascara on her lashes — a detail that felt almost like a ploy to humanize her, especially since the makeup almost always appeared dry and clumpy like she’d slept in it for days. The question is: was this intentional?
One of the many questions at the center of Fielder’s film is whether Holmes is a master manipulator, playing a character or a mark of male manipulation. It’s a question made all the more complicated by Holmes’ insistence that she never described her public persona as a character of her own creation.
But both can be true: Holmes may have chosen to pare down her makeup to play the sympathy card in Fielder’s film — or she could have been nudged by fiancé Billy Evans to do so, as some viewers have speculated online. The image she cultivated during Theranos’ rise may have been shaped, in part, by Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her partner at the time, or it could have been a choice singularly made my Holmes in the era of the full-beat makeup.
And that raises another question: How much of Holmes’ carefully cultivated appearance, from her girl boss-era red lip and dark eyeliner to her much more pared back look in “You Can See Everything,” was a reflection of who she actually was, and how much was part of the persona(s) she presented to the world?
Indeed, the motivation behind her beauty remains unknown, leaving it up to us to decide what we want to believe.
