How fake facial hair is made for movies & TV

• Fake facial hair can be made several different ways: the hairs can be tied together onto a lace piece, laid directly onto a performer's face, punched into a prosthetic piece, or glued onto a fake head and then floated off as one piece.
• Makeup artists have to make sure they choose the correct blend of colors and the right strand of hair that will match the texture of a given piece of facial hair.
• John Blake created a durable lace beard for Kurt Russell after he had to shave his real beard for "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" while Richard Redlefsen had to lay and blend pieces of hair into Martin Starr's beard to make it look longer in "Silicon Valley."

Following is a full transcript of the video.

Ian Phillips: The average diameter of human hair is 17 to 181 micrometers. Not centimeters; not millimeters; micrometers.

And whether they're applied to a prosthetic piece or woven in, movie makeup artists have to painstakingly apply each micro hair to create something as realistic as this, Kurt Russell's beard in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2." In some of these shots, Kurt is sporting his real beard, while in others it's a fake.

Can't tell the difference? Neither can I, and neither can this guy, John Blake, the makeup artist who made the fake beard for the movie.

Hollywood makeup artists have to make facial hair so convincing that even they're not sure what's real in the end.

There are four methods makeup artists use to apply fake facial hair, all of which have to look real. Three types are applied onto an actor's face, and the fourth type is actually applied to a hyperreal prosthetic head.

The benefit of working with a prosthesis is that you can make the hair look as if it's coming straight from the skin, like real hair. You do this by punching it in. But punching those fine hairs is a time-consuming process.

For example, to get eyelashes right, a makeup artist like Kenneth Calhoun takes a long strand of hair and bends it. He then takes a needle and punches two eyelashes in at a time. After the few hours it takes to punch in the hairs, he focuses on the details.

Kenneth Calhoun: You can't just put a bunch of lashes going out straight. They don't stick out like that; they fan out.

Ian: Along with fanning out, real lashes have a curl to them. To get a distinct bend, he uses his needle to wrap the hairs around a heated iron. You can see how they both fan out and curl.

Kenneth punched stubble into a fake head when working on the 2020 film "The Rental." But when working with a prosthesis, giving it the illusion of hair can be almost as realistic as punching in the real thing.

For this prosthetic head, Kenneth painted a mix of grays on the neck that perfectly gives the appearance of shadow and stubble with no hairs applied.

The second way is to use the lace method, probably the most commonly used method to apply fake hair to an actor's face.

John Blake: Here's your piece of lace. It's made out of nylon, and it has little holes, and a little hook is used to tie each individual hair.

Ian: Like punching hairs into a prosthesis, the lace method is labor intensive because each hair is added with a needle. The difference? Instead of punching it in, it's threaded through holes.

Here, makeup artist Kristy Staky is tying an especially long beard for the show "Dwight in Shining Armor." At the top of the beard, she only ties one hair per hole. Farther down, she ties more hairs to a hole, but spreads them out. If she did one hair per hole throughout the whole piece, it would get too dense and then look fake.

Lace pieces often take up to six days to knot and style, and the average lace beard contains 200 hairs per square inch.

It's why John Blake needed to work with four other makeup artists to tie Kurt Russell's fake beard together in a pinch for "Guardians 2" after the actor had to shave his real beard for a flashback and didn't have time to grow it back.

Because all the hairs are tied in, lace pieces stay tight on the face, making them ideal for action movies and even more ideal for blending into the skin. This is why you might've never guessed that Captain Barbossa's beard in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise was fake. It's one of John Blake's many masterpieces.

Still, when working on a lace piece, it's not as simple as recreating how an actor's hair would naturally grow. There's a ton of creativity involved, depending on what the script calls for.

For "Captain America: Civil War," John made these eyebrows for William Hurt to play Thunderbolt Ross. John: He had to be a military man, and he wanted to have a more hawkish-like quality, and to create this hawkish-like quality we created false eyebrows.

Ian: To get the right effect, choosing the right type of hair was key. Yak hair, which is thick and coarse, is commonly used to replicate beards, but eyebrows are so thin and delicate that John went with angora hair instead, which is much smaller in diameter but still made the actor's eyebrows look thicker than his real-life brows.

Where lace-applied fake facial hair can leave an actor feeling stiff, the third method lets an actor move their face more freely. It's called hand laying. John C. Reilly is wearing a hand-laid beard in "Walk Hard," and you can see just how expressive he is.

For this method, makeup artists apply glue to the actor's skin and place the hair in clumps straight onto the performer's face. By putting the clumps of loose hair between the thumb and forefinger and dragging it back and forth on the glue, John can even leave natural stubble behind on the cheeks and jawline.

Hand laying hair is also the best technique if you want to add more hair to an actor's already existing facial hair. The key is hiding the line between where the real facial hair ends and where the fake hair starts, like the makeup artist for "Silicon Valley" had to do to actor Martin Starr for the series finale. To make sure the line between real and fake was invisible, he curled the hairs in and out until it looked like this.

To show the fourth and final method, we asked Kenneth to recreate, well, my beard.

So, this is about the longest I'll let my beard grow before it really needs a trim.

Kenneth is going to use the floating method, which is great for actors who aren't on set every day, because this type of hairpiece only lasts for about one or two applications.

To make a floated beard, Kenneth forms the beard on a fake head, then hairsprays it. Then the whole piece gets glued onto an actor's face. Even though the process is simpler, it still requires attention to detail.

Kenneth: There are a few things that I noticed, was just the coarseness underneath the chin. Something else I noticed is, like, the direction of your sideburns, how they kind of swirl as they go down. You have, like, a couple of parts here where your mustache grows down, and you have a second area that grows down as well.

Ian: To match the different consistencies of my facial hair, Kenneth used a combination of yak hair and crepe wool.

The crepe wool is so curly that it needs to bathe in warm water first. You can make a lot more shapes with the crepe wool, so it's better for the curlier parts of the beard, while the yak hair is better for the straighter hairs. And like any piece of real facial hair, there's a lot of grooming and styling along the way.

Now, the big reveal.

Oh, my God.

Kenneth: You like it?

Ian: Looks exactly like mine. I could wear that on my face, and I think people would not be able to tell the difference.