(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wednesday’s “Masked Singer” Season 6 finale.)
Queen of Hearts ended up being the crown jewel of the sixth season of “The Masked Singer” when she was named this edition’s winner on Wednesday’s finale and unmasked to reveal Grammy-nominated singer Jewel.
While many a “Masked Singer” contestant has professed their love and attachment to their costume after being unveiled, Jewel has by far the coolest connection to her getup that we’ve ever heard. Because in the most Jewel move ever, Jewel actually designed the sparkly, jewel-like Queen of Hearts costume.
“I do visual art and I’ve been working on a sculpture recently of a heart with this one eye, this sort of golden eye,” Jewel told TheWrap. “And the eye sort of looked like a star or something like that. It’s slightly abstract. But I have just been thinking a lot about the heart and the power of the heart in my artwork. And so when I decided to do ‘The Masked Singer,’ I wanted to try and adapt that artwork into a costume. So, I drew a rough of it and gave it to the costume designer [Marina Toybina]. And we just got to collaborate, and I got to basically live in that artwork. It was pretty cool.”
Immediately following her win on “The Masked Singer” Wednesday night, Jewel released an EP of all the covers she performed while masked as Queen of Hearts throughout Season 6, which you can find here. The idea behind the project was to capture what Jewel was able to experience by competing in disguise.
“For me, doing the show, what was interesting — I do a lot of work in the mental health space and something I teach our kids at a mental health foundation for kids is that your worth isn’t and shouldn’t be tied up to anything outside of yourself,” Jewel said. “You’re not your name. You’re not your job title. You’re not whether you have a hit or have not had a hit. What you most essentially are can’t be taken away. And so it was kind of interesting with this show, even though it’s just like this sort of pop show, I found that really to be a really deep and cool part of it that I got to be so myself.”
The Grammy-nominated singer continued: “It wasn’t focusing on my name or my titles or where I live or even my accent. It really had to do with what I believe is most essentially me, which is trying to champion the heart, trying to sing things emotionally, trying to make people feel things. And so in that way, I felt like I got to be really, really authentic in the show — even though I was trying to throw people off with my accent and sort of the more superfluous things.”