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Chances are, you’ve heard of Madame Tussauds — the world-famous wax museum known for its life-sized celebrity figures.
We (Ajani and Terry) visited theNew Yorklocation for a behind-the-scenes tour. We spoke with several key staff members: Marketing Manager Eliza Rose, Studio Manager Matthew Hilshorst, Studio Artist and Seamstress Taylor Hindersman, and Studio Artist Kendra VanAllen.
We learneda lotabout how these figures are made — more than we ever expected. Here are our biggest takeaways.
Note : Quotes featured in this article have been edited for length and uncloudedness .
1.The first part of the process is called a sitting, where staffers record the measurements and every detail of the celebrity’s body.
2.Only the heads of the figures are made of wax. Their bodies are mainly cast in fiberglass.
“If it were all wax, it would be so heavy and also so brittle. There’s no way the whole figure could be wax,” Hilshorst said.
“When they first were making wax figures, they all had wax hands as well. Now, the bodies are mostly all fiberglass, because the wax fingers break off so easily,” Hilshorst explained, adding, “People often bump into the figures, so a big part of the studio team’s job has become casting hands and making resin versions to replace them more easily.”
3.The eyes are handmade with acrylic.
During sittings, celebrities are presented with a box of artificial eyes to help find the exact color that matches theirs.
4.The creators use “ethically sourced” human hair on the wax figures, including for their eyebrows, eyelashes, and other body hair, with one caveat.
“It is all human hair. It’s all ethically sourced, and then we process it; however, we have to create the exact style, look, color, and texture that it needs to be to use curling irons on it constantly,” Hilshorst shared. “With synthetic hair, you can’t do that. We have to be able to style it regularly so the wax figures look A-list, red carpet ready.”
“The only time it might not be human hair is if it’s an older person, like George Washington, or someone like that. Then they may be wearing a wig,” he confessed. “You can’t source that old texture of hair, so we’ll generally use yaki hair, and you can still style it.”
5.Putting in hair to create the eyebrows can take six to ten hours.
“We’ll take the eye of an embroidery needle where the thread would usually go through, and we cut it in half so it turns into a teeny, tiny fork that you can use to hook each [eyebrow] hair with,” VanAllen disclosed.
6.Depending on the texture, inserting the hair on a wax figure can take up to 500 hours.
During sittings, talent will work with staff to find the perfect combination of hair colors for the wax figure, “because everybody has undertones and highlights and low lights to make the overall color.” Individual strands of hair are also presented side by side next to the celebrity to capture the exact hue of their tresses.
“The Martin Luther King Jr. figure on the floor right now came to us from San Francisco, and he had some sort of heat damage or something on some of his hair,” VanAllen recalled.
“I had to remove all the hair to replace it with the correct texture,” she added. “To do it, just about a third of a set, took 500 hours, roughly 19 full 24-hour days. It took three months, and it was all I was doing: punching in hairs one by one.”
7.No makeup is applied to the wax figures. Oil-based paint is used instead.
“When celebrities come for their sitting, they generally have a makeup team and a glam squad, including their stylist. We won’t use their actual makeup on their face,” Hilshorst told us. “We’ll find out what that makeup is, buy it, and then mix oil paint to match it perfectly so we can paint it on their face.”
8.Some wax figures are challenging to paint.
“Some female figures, if they have [heavy] makeup on, to make them look like a real person, is complicated. For guys, you can put in veins and do different things with tiny detail brushes, but women have to look picture perfect,” he noted. “Trying to keep [their makeup look] but also make it not look like a wax figure but look like a real person, that’s always a real challenge.”
9.Celebs are “very involved” in the process from start to finish, even if they can’t physically be there for sittings.
“A lot of times, they’ll donate things. They may not have time to do an actual sitting if they’re filming movies or on tour, but they’ll be very interested and [say], ‘This is how I want my hair’ or ‘This is the outfit I want to wear,'” Hilshorst shared.
“If the wax figures are created from our research, we’ll work with their team and get a lot of photographs,” he added. “When making their sculpture, we’ll have about 100 photos [in the studio], which looks like a shrine to that celebrity.”
“The first part is the brief stage,” Hilshorst explained. “We [say], ‘This is the brief: This is what we want you to wear.’ And then [the celebrity and their rep] will work with us. Next, we move to the clay stage, where we show the clay sculpture to them and ask, ‘Do you have any changes?’ If so, we make those changes in clay.”
“Finally, we’ll do the wax,” he said. “We’ll generally show the team how it’s going, and they tell us, ‘Yes! No. I love this. I don’t like that.’ So when we present the finished product, the reveal is perfect.”
10.Sometimes, celebrities have difficulty remaining static long enough to get their wax figure pose just right.
“If they’re in a difficult pose, they will have trouble holding it [for the duration of the sitting],” VanAllen told us.
