- - How Bridgerton Created Sophie’s Cinderella Look

Emily BurackFebruary 1, 2026 at 9:30 PM

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There were high expectations for Bridgerton season four—particularly around the ball when Sophie (Yerin Ha) meets Benedict (Luke Thompson) for the first time. The story is drawn from the quintessential Cinderella fairytale (as adapted from An Offer from a Gentleman by Julia Quinn); instead of leaving a shoe behind when the clock strikes midnight, however, Sophie leaves a glove.

When Yerin Ha first put on her “Lady in Silver” dress for the masquerade ball, she tells T&C, “I really did feel like Cinderella. I remember I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m a princess!’” Nic Collins, the hair and makeup designer, and John Glaser, the costume designer, collaborated to bring the outfit to life. “We worked on the same corridor next door to each other. We spent most of our time in and out of each other’s rooms—every single element is thought about, everything,” says Collins.

Here, how each element of the look came together:

The dress

Sophie and Benedict meet for the first time. Netflix

In An Offer from a Gentleman, Sophie’s masquerade outfit is described as an old silver dress. “At the very bottom of the trunk they’d found an exquisite creation of shimmering silver, with a tight, pearl-encrusted bodice and the flared skirts that had been so popular during the previous century,” Quinn writes. “Sophie felt like a princess just touching it. It was a bit musty from its years in the trunk, and one of the maids quickly took it outside to dab a bit of rosewater on the fabric and air it out.”

The show tweaks this discovery. “As you know that dress is supposed to be from the attic—it’s her grandmother’s,” says Glaser. “We started with that type of period dress, but it didn’t really work because we're saying we have to think of our audience—and putting an old dress on a young girl just was not a good thing. So talking to [executive producer] Betsy Beers from Shondland, we decided to make it her cousin’s dress. It’s a fantasy shape and fantasy fabrics and it just has to be attractive to Benedict and attractive to our audience to think it’s a pretty dress.”

A poster for the Disney version of Cinderella. LMPC - Getty Images

Initial versions of Sophie’s dress paid closer homage to Cinderella. “It started out as a fuller skirt, like you think of a Cinderella skirt, but that’s what wasn’t working. It was like, ‘All right, this is not pretty and it’s a Disney dress.’ It couldn’t be a Disney dress,” says Glaser. George Sayer, the assistant costume designer who created the dress, adds, “It was much more corseted. We dropped the waistline right down when we did that incarnation of it. We went back to Regency and then we changed up again, which we went through three different stages to get to where we are.”

The final version of the dress was made using Italian silver lamé chiffon and hand-layered sequins for maximum onscreen sparkle. “It was quite good to change the dress,” she says, “so it didn’t look like every other Cinderella dress. So it was good to be able to go by the Regency shape.”

The mask

Sophie’s mask covers the majority of his face. Netflix

The first iteration of Sophie’s mask was a lace one that wrapped around her face, but you could still see who she was. “Her mask started out much more simple and more transparent, but it didn’t serve the story because he would have known who she was,” Glaser says. “So we had to have a larger mask, a more opaque mask. And because of that, if you see the rest of the crowd, there’s other people that have masks that are similar to her shape, so that hers doesn’t stick out and that would help confuse him a little bit.”

He added, “If it was [up to us] it would’ve been a little piece of lace. But then, Benedict would’ve looked really stupid!”

The hair

A view of Ha’s hair in the scene. Netflix

“Storyline really dictated her look,” explains Collins. “This is an off the cuff incident that she’s here. She wasn’t invited, she didn’t know it was happening. We wanted it to be realistic.”

Ha has long hair, so Collins began thinking about how to make her hair both look real and ball-worthy. “At first there was talk about a wig,” she says, but that raised too many questions: “Where would she get the wig from? Who’s wearing the wig? How does she put the wig on, how does it come off?” The logistics of the wig, she says, “didn’t sit well.”

So the team decided on something much simpler: A braided updo. “I love braid work,” Collins says. “I’m a big fan of braiding hair. We did a five stem braid—we tested a three stem, four stem, and a five stem just to see which one slightly to what level we wanted—and then just basically placed it as a crown. It just works because it’s simple.”

The makeup

Ha has lip tint, blush, and eyeliner on for the scene. Netflix

Since Sophie is a servant, the team thought about what products Posey, Rosalind, and Araminta would have lying around. So even though the mask covers most of Sophie’s face, she does have makeup on: blush, lip balm, and eyeliner.

“There is rouge, blush, balm, and [other] makeup in the house,” says Collins. “That was the whole idea: We would just flush up the cheeks and put a bit of balm on the lips, like a crimson, poppy color, so that you see it. And even that little bit is such a big contrast to how we see her normal in her maid look with no makeup.”

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For lips, they used Clinique’s Chubby Stick dabbed on top of some Carmex.

The eyeliner, Collins says, “is just to give definition. Because as a maid, she doesn’t take kohl [on her eyes]. But when you put those masks on, they’re quite stark. You need a little bit of a line just to identify—otherwise you start losing the eyes. You have to take that into consideration.”

Ha, Collins explains, “is quite serious and she’s quite method, so she doesn’t like too much to be applied at all, she likes to keep it in character. I admire any actor that wants to work that way.”

The accessories

In Cinderella, she leaves behind a glass slipper. In Bridgerton, Sophie leaves a single glove. Netflix

Of course, key to the scene is Sophie’s gloves—she leaves one behind, and Benedict picks it up and uses it to search for her. The vintage satin gloves have Dior-inspired monogram. Her shoes are a modified silver Jimmy Choo heel.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”