The Sopranos pulled in 12 million weekly viewers at its peak, so like most of America from 1999 to 2007, my family spent many Sunday nights in front of the TV waiting to see who lived and who got clipped. For me, it was also a time to revel in the beauty aesthetic I hadn’t really seen before on television. What I saw on my screen—in all its glorious, Italian-American gaud—mirrored the women I saw at the malls, ShopRite, the cleaners, and on the boardwalk down the shore. Today, the women of The Sopranos are all over my social feeds—almost as honest in their excess as they were when the HBO series premiered 25 years ago.
For audiences outside the tri-state area, the show’s characters came across as caricatures that could only exist in crime dramas: take Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco), the “connected” and privileged suburban mother of two adorned with frosty eyeshadow and diamonds that may or may not have fallen off the back of a truck, or Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo), the cheetah-swathed, twenty-something with XL acrylics and tendrils hot off the curling iron. But for Kymbra Callaghan-Kelley, an Emmy-winning lead makeup artist and Jersey girl just like me, inspiration came from everywhere around her.
“That’s where I pulled from,” Callaghan-Kelley shares exclusively with Vogue. She joined the crew after the pilot episode was filmed. For the remainder of the show’s six seasons, she translated the in-your-face, Garden State glam for the rest of the nation: too much is never enough; put two on, take none off—and then, add more. Soon after Callaghan-Kelley signed on, she realized she needed an extra hand to nail that ethos down to the fingertips, so she did what any Jersey girl would do: She called a friend from high school.
“Kymbra called and said ‘I want Carmela to have pink and white acrylics. I want that for her,’” recalls New Jersey-based manicurist Maria Salandra of the early-aughts status manicure, which became the matriarch’s signature. “It was the ‘rich’ thing to do, especially back then.”
This remains one of The Sopranos’ many defining themes: class; wealth, and the illusion of wealth. Beyond the mansions, Harry Winston sapphires, and bird feeders stuffed with cash that showed audiences out-right where the money was, it was the makeup, hair, and manicures that helped quietly re-enforced the status quo among the female characters and their families, even when the looks themselves were loud.
