Halloween!

This holiday is all about makeup! For me, at least. Since I became a professional artist I won't do a costume unless it involves a major look. A few years ago I was Tammy Faye Bakker--it was so fun to cake product on and then ruin it with eyedrops to get Tammy's tear-streaked, runny face. This year I was Snooki from Jersey Shore, a costume I did for my 30th birthday party this summer and liked so well I had to do it again. Of course, when you're an artist, everyone comes knocking for you to do their costume makeup, and if you're me, you never turn them away.

Halloween is a time I get to explore some new techniques and really push my creativity. Several years ago a friend was dressing up as an anime character and wanted me to create those huge stylized eyes such characters have. I turned her entire lid into an eye so that when she closed, they looked open. It was a really interesting concept that awed. I did this with a lot of black liner, electric blue and white eyeshadow. I turned her brows into her lash line and made her top lashes into her bottom row. If you look at it for a while it's kind of mesmerizing!

Another time, a friend of my former boss wanted to crash his fiancee's batchelorette party looking like he'd staggered in from a brutal bar fight. I had never done injury makeup before and enjoyed creating several different types of bruises and a shiner. While I was blending hot pink blush, navy liner pencil and shimmer powder into his face, he practiced moaning. We dotted on some fake blood to finish the damage. Apparently when he walked in his fiancee freaked out and rushed to him in concern (the desired effect?).



Pam loves Halloween. Every year she tries to outdo herself with her amazing crafting and costuming abilities. For the past several years she's been some form of sea life--stingray, narwhale, seahorse, etc. This year she decided to be a land animal and settled on a deer. We instantly agreed that I would do her makeup and she would handle the costume. The lighting here doesn't quite show the colors as they appeared in real life, but you get the idea. We got this look by using a ton of bronze-y eyeshadow, white cream and powder shadow, black liquid facepaint and fine white-gold glitter. In person her skin had almost a liquid metallic sheen and the bronze graduated from darker around the white of the eyes to softer towards the edges of her face. We popped out all the white with an ample tap of glitter (seen best on her nose and freckles). I love doing Pam's makeup for Halloween because of how seriously she takes her costume and how much fun she has with it.

As you might imagine, when I was done with the makeup appointments I had yesterday I barely had the energy to coat myself in orange-y bronzer and black eyeliner for my Snooki look. I managed to pull it together to go out to dinner in costume but was back on the couch for good by 9:30. It does beat the years I lived in AZ and would come home from the MAC counter after 8 hours of Halloween makeup and pass out on my face by 6pm!