Excerpt from ICQMagazine.com:

Makeup effects supervisor Greg Cannom found Blanchett’s makeup to be among his most challenging assignments, largely because of the actress’s prominent cheekbones. “Tampering with that would have been ridiculous,” Cannom recalls, “so instead I put aging detail down in the nasal creases, and also on the neck and the forehead.” [Blanchett wore fourteen appliances, enduring up to four hours of makeup and hair for the last two weeks of filming.]  Cannom says that his use of silicone appliances was based not only on the material’s superiority to latex and gelatin in toughness and resiliency, but also in large part on how readily light it takes to light. “Silicone has life and depth that makes it look a thousand times better than foam,” he insists. “Initially, I feared shooting makeups with digital capture, as it might reveal the slightest defect. But after seeing tests on a high-end projector, I was shocked at how well it worked. We could airbrush patches of color and age spots onto the silicone and it didn’t leap out at you. Claudio and his team did a great job shooting the makeups.”

Button also benefited from another development, one that arose out of Cannom’s discomfort with traditional forehead appliances, which invariably distort an actor’s features. Silicone prosthetics were combined with ‘transfer pieces,’ a paper-thin plastic appliance that can be lined up with facial features so they seem to fit into the face rather than look planted-on. “They give the impression of depth,” Cannom elaborates. “I could put a piece the size of a quarter on the eyelid to get an effect of crow’s feet.” This more subtle approach also proved beneficial on Pitt’s old-age makeups. The actor had requested a rough skin texture, so Cannom’s initial old-age makeup incorporated deep forehead lines. “It looked horrible – interesting, but horrible. So I scaled it back to a thin realistic aging on the forehead with lines coming down.” In addition to designing Pitt’s age makeup (a process that involved sculptor Miles Teves), Cannom handled application personally, while his Drac Studio facility wound up taking over manufacture of all prosthetics during production, including those that take Pitt from his mid 60s down to his 40s. The heavily de-aged younger vision of Button included CG blending of Pitt’s face onto other actors, who wore makeups created by Cannom that highlighted the designer’s real-world understanding of aging and skin textures.