Don't Label Half Magic Beauty By Euphoria's Doniella Davy As A Cool Girl Makeup Brand
The beauty virtuoso and de facto glitter queen wants to make makeup accessible to everyone.
Doniella Davy is no stranger to the world of film and television makeup, having worked on movies like Moonlight (2016) and Under The Silver Lake (2018). But she is best known for creating headline-grabbing beauty looks on the hit HBO show Euphoria, which earned her an Emmy in 2020 for Outstanding Contemporary Makeup and spawned one of the biggest beauty trends that shook the TikTok-sphere.
READ MORE: Watch Video: Iman Fandi DIY-Ed A Euphoria-Inspired Makeup On IG Live
Davy, who is best known in industry circles as Donni, is now fulfilling every Euphoria and rhinestone-loving fan fantasy with the recent debut of Half Magic Beauty – a culmination of a decade's worth of experience that brings the fantastical power of glitter to everyday life. The brand is currently selling via its website.
According to Davy, the name Half Magic carries dual meanings – the first being how "makeup is half the magic, the person wearing it is the other half", while the other is how the brand acts as the "bridge between fantastical makeup and everyday life."
Surprisingly, venturing into the beauty business was something Davy did not plan. She studied Art and Photography at New York's Pratt Institute and interned at art galleries in Brooklyn prior to getting into the makeup scene. It wasn't till a friend's mother suggested she try dabbling with cosmetics that she decided to make the jump.
READ MORE: 5 Make Up Looks From Euphoria That Are Beautiful And So Easy To Recreate
"It wasn’t a premeditated thing. I just thought it sounded really interesting and I just went for it," she shared over a video call with FEMALE recently – her first interview with a fashion and beauty magazine in Singapore – while on a production set in Los Angeles. "That sensibility of picking up on details and looking at a person and getting information on who they are has really helped me." added Davy.
Davy was all hands on deck when it came to the brand. "I really wanted to do it and do it right, not just put my name on a makeup palette. I’m a working makeup artist with a makeup brand, so I wanted to be deeply involved in it, not just choosing colours and putting my name on it."
It was the success of Euphoria and the slew of Instagram DMs she had received enquiring about the makeup after the show aired in 2019 that paved the way for Half Magic Beauty. Davy revealed that while there were opportunities for her to collaborate with existing brands prior to the show, she was hesitant.
"I figured that if there is this opportunity for me to do (my own) makeup line, I want to start from scratch, build it from the bottom up and make it exactly how I envisioned it," she added. After much discussion with producers at A24 – the film house that produced Euphoria – Half Magic Beauty finally came to fruition. Today, the brand is a subsidiary of Rules Beauty which is A24's portfolio company focusing on beauty.
"I would love to see people who think they can’t really wear colour and glitter to start using Half Magic on themselves and sort of become seduced by it," shared Davy. "I think it’s one of my biggest secret goals."
Ahead, the beauty maven shared how she's bringing a new perspective to the scene.
"Everything is made to be user-friendly. This is not a cool girl brand – it’s just not that. There are other makeup brands that are that, but I wanted Half Magic Beauty to be very unintimidating.
I want all our tools to be user-friendly – such as the applicator shapes, which are wide at the bottom then taper and angle upwards. I’m thinking about the people who might not have makeup brushes or are a beginner and don’t have anything. I want them to be able to buy one of our eye paints and just apply them on and not have (to worry about) the right kind of brushes or tools.
I hope this brand is somebody’s first makeup brand that would feel truly free to play with, but then I also hope that – because the formulas are pretty elevated – other professionals or people who are into fancy makeup will also try it out even if they’ve never seen Euphoria or think they aren’t Gen Z and it’s not for them.”
"My mission – what I consider my job – is to always help tell and enhance the storyline of a film or a show, not distract from it. It also depends on what the story is and what the director wants.
The director of Euphoria could have just said that he wanted the actresses to look like they have no makeup – just ultra gritty and ultra real. But he happened to think that makeup would be a really useful tool to enhance the storyline. So I figured out how to use it to reflect what the characters were going through and merge that with my sensibilities from Moonlight which was about this very real and lived-in skin.
I like that the looks (on Euphoria) felt kind of imperfect sometimes – like the skin was flushed and had that sense of realism to it – which I think is essential in telling a story."
"I’m the type of person who puts a lot of thought into little things like product names. One Instagram post or TikTok takes me so freaking long to do because I think so hard about what I’m trying to say.
So naturally, it was really fun to come up with the product names for Half Magic Beauty, but it also took a very long time because I wanted them to be entertaining and fun. I want people to notice the names and feel a certain mood or attitude when they pick up our products (such as the lipliners) I Have Needs or I’ll Pray For You. I want people to feel that when they're putting these on, they're revealing their 'bad b***h' self.
The packaging (think eyeshadows in pill-shaped packaging) was really fun to create because I want it to be exciting; to make people feel both delighted and caught off guard at the same time while putting them in a good mood and at an unintimidating place."
"(I hope) Half Magic Beauty can be really helpful in letting you figure out who you are and discovering the many versions of yourself. It’s not just self-expression or decoration – it’s deeper than that.
Glitter is what most fans expressed they want to experiment with – but glitter can be really messy to work with. So I thought if I ever have a makeup line, I know exactly what I would do (the brand's eyeshadows are formulated to be transfer- and smudge-proof, with eye-safe glitters that are designed to have minimal fallout and maximum effect)."
"You don’t need a special occasion to do green-winged eyes with glitter on it. You don’t have to rely on any other preconceived notions of when a look like that would be appropriate. I’m seeing people use the liner in ways I never expected – someone was using our green eye paint in the shade We Are Aliens as a blush. The other day, I saw another person use our Magic Brownie lip cream with our blue lip liner on top of it to make a very cool brown. I never would have thought to do these things and use them that way; it blows my mind to see the ways people are using Half Magic Beauty and teaching me how to use my own line."
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity