'Cabinet of Curiosities': Lotion Lady in 'The Outside' Is Actually Real

What's creepier than the lotion lady in Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities? The fact that it's 100 percent real.

The episode that made periwinkle and peptides the stuff of nightmares, "The Outside" stars Kate Micucci (actress and one half of comedy music duo Garfunkel and Oates) as a frumpy bank teller whose attempts to fit in at work end in murder.

Although Cabinet of Curiosities' fourth episode contained a violent ax attack and a scalpel to the forehead, it was the freaky lotion lady that really captured viewers' attention. Crafted entirely using physical effects, the slippery spook took hours and hundreds of bottles of moisturizer to create.

Newsweek asked Oscar-winning make-up artist David Leroy Anderson how he brought the most memorable monster in Guillermo del Toro's anthology series to life.

AloGlo? Hell No

Tired of being the weird chick in the office, Micucci's Stacey starts using "AloGlo," a lotion that promises to make her beautiful. While most people would have given up on AloGlo when the rash started, Stacey keeps going, ending up with a dead husband (Martin Starr) and a moisturizer monster in her basement.

For Anderson, "The Outside" was "a breath of fresh air." Known for his work on Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Cabin in the Woods (2011), and American Horror Story, the make-up artist was used to getting requests for more gruesome subject matter, so he was excited to work on something so unique.

"After seven years of American Horror Story it was exactly what I needed," he said.

To ensure each episode had its own flavor, each monster was created by a different make-up artist. In an early meeting, Anderson was told that "The Outside" would have a similar tone to Death Becomes Her—the dark comedy starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as rivals who resort to magic to stay young and beautiful. Anderson had worked on the 1990s cult classic alongside his father, co-founder of AFX Studios Lance Anderson.

"The keywords I was given were sparkly, liquid and periwinkle," he said. "I was in immediately."

The 'Motion of Lotion'

As the project developed, Anderson became more and more invested in making "the living version of lotion." However, bringing the "ideal" woman to life in the form of a moisturizer was a challenge.

The first step involved pouring lotion onto flat surfaces and filming the flow to understand the "motion of lotion."

"We tried every lotion on the market," he said. "We were looking for the perfect flow and the perfect consistency. One particular lotion beat all of the rest, it just looked really sexy."

Originally, the figure was supposed to resemble Micucci, but after director Ana Lily Amirpour saw the concept images for that make-out scene between Stacey and the monster, she changed her mind.

"Lily just said 'no that's wrong,' so we converted the lotion lady to a hyper-ideal form of modern beauty," he explained.

Using magazines and supermodels as references, they began sculpting the features on actress Lize Johnston's face using Photoshop.

"It's very passive and sexy, but it's also amorphous," he said. "She's smoothed out, her eyes are closed, her mouth doesn't open.

"She's just a sexy, forever-flowing, periwinkle female."

Once the design was approved, Anderson and his team had to work out how to make the skin-tight, silicone suit that would fit a real person.

"There's two ways to go about it," he explained. "You can sculpt the suit out of clay and create a mold on that. Or, you can take the human form and actually fabricate right on top of it."

The team created a custom spandex suit that fit Johnston from wrist to ankle, as well as a rigid foam copy of her body to work on. They began sculpting silicone right onto the spandex, which Anderson compared to a "wet suit."

"We could apply this particular type of silicone very thinly," he said.

"In areas it was less than an eighth of an inch thick, and in others, it was a quarter of an inch where you could see the drips.

"The final product turned out to be this incredibly sexy, supple, thin—it looked like liquid lotion."

'It Was All Over the Place'

The silicone allowed Johnston to move freely, but filming in Toronto came with other challenges. The drips were originally supposed to be added digitally in post-production, but producers loved the look so much, they wanted to use real lotion on the model.

"They asked 'can we just put some handfuls of the lotion right on top of her before we roll and have real lotion flowing all over her?'" he said.

Unfortunately, the suggestion presented a lot of potential issues, such as mess and problems with continuity, especially as the food coloring used to dye the lotion periwinkle was extra slippery.

"I was fearful of putting materials on top of the suit, as it was so conductive to heat and cold," he said.

"We were shooting this in Toronto during the winter, and I was worried about body temperature. Just getting to the trailer in a skin suit that pulls in the cold was very tricky."

Luckily, Anderson said it was worth it in the end. It did mean the monster make-out scene had to be taken in one shot.

"Once we got it all over Kate, there was no backing out," he said. "We just had to go for it. It was all over the place."

Despite working in the film industry for 30 years, Anderson said working with Del Toro and Amirpour on "The Outside" has been a highlight of his career.

"It's not your traditional monster," he said. "It's very psychological."

"Just being invited to this party, this celebration of practical effects, has been an honor."