Jennifer Morrison Talks Once Upon a Time, Hair Color, and Free Mascara
Jennifer Morrison is all princess hair and ass-kicking attitude on Once Upon a Time. You may remember her as Cameron on House. Hilariously, when Morrison auditioned for that role, she was her own best competition: She was short-listed after trying out for executive producer Brian Singer as a brunette, and when her agent sent tapes of her as a blond, Singer watched and purportedly said, “Wow, this girl’s also great. We should test her against Jennifer.” We asked the hair color chameleon which hue was her favorite and how she feels about glamorous onscreen beauty looks for down-to-earth characters.
You’ve been a brunette, a redhead, and you’re so blonde now. Do you prefer one color to the other? “It’s easiest for me to be blonde because I’m naturally blonde; my roots are light enough that all I have to do is just highlight my hair every few months. When my hair was dark for House, that was the hardest to maintain because it was like every three weeks my light roots would start coming in. And you can’t really just dye your hair one color brown because then it looks like a helmet on television, so then I had to have four colors of brown woven into my hair every three weeks. I felt like I was like losing my life in the hair chair.”
Where do you get your color done now? “I get my highlights touched up with Susan Henry at Shades in Beverly Hills. She developed hypo-allergenic hair color products with no ammonia because she’s allergic to others; she’s an incredible colorist. She does balayage instead of the foils, and I’ll go and she will do my entire head of highlights in an hour.”
What skin-care products do you use? “I use the Koh Gen Do face cleanser and the foaming face wash. The cleanser takes the make-up off and then the foaming face wash is like a deep cleaner. I use this lotion called Fenix, it has a little bit of SPF in it. I get facials every two weeks if I can at the Face Place in Los Angeles; it’s a pure deep clean, not a bunch of products. My face just doesn’t do well with lots and lots of products.”
What makeup do you wear off-screen? “I’ve been wearing the Koh Gen Do makeup for five years. It really sits on my skin well, so it doesn’t look like I’m wearing make-up. I’m a mascara girl. In a gift bag a couple of years ago, I got [Le 2 De Guerlain Mascara] and I’ve been using it ever since. It’s an opaque black.”
So often in movies and TV a beauty look is so over-the-top glam that’s it’s incongruous with a character. That’s always my first thing with my characters— I always want it to suit the reality of that person’s life. With Emma, that was a big conversation. We really felt like because she is so tough and is so rough around the edges, we wanted there to be a softness to her somehow. The implication that if she had grown up in a fairy-tale is that she would have been a very different person. We wanted the core of her to represent something softer and more feminine.”
That explains the princess hair. “Yeah. The idea was that there was a bit of a wave. I let it air-dry and then they give it a bit of soft curl. There’s always a pretty extensive process that goes into those choices.”
For more with Allure’s Face Jennifer Morrison, including her role in getting Glee off the ground, check out the March issue.
