Put Together This Horrible Halloween Costume With Stuff You Already Own (And Wind Up Being the Belle of the Ball!)
Surprise surprise, the girl who dresses people for a living (that’s me) always manages to drop the ball when it comes to Halloween, constantly finding herself flailing around at the last minute with no costume and not even a hint of an idea for one.
If you’re like me and still don’t know what you’re going to wear to pass out Halloween candy tonight, just do what I did this past weekend: wear a mashup of every single random costume piece you already own from years past, regardless of whether they go together or not. Top the whole thing off with the most awful makeup look you can think of, and you’re done!
I went with the ludicrous face paint stylings of Insane Clown Posse vocalist Violent J, also known as ‘the chubby one’. When married to a 10-year old Marie Antoinette wig and a long-forgotten, more than slightly slutty Hofbräuhaus waitress dress I snagged from work, it was a terrifyingly winning look. (Just be glad I didn’t accidentally steal a sexy Twizzlers costume, or this post would have been even more terrible.)
When I say this look was winning, I mean WINNING—as in when I rolled up to my great pal Alice’s party on Saturday night and she finally realized it was me, she said “Holy hell, I saw you walking up and thought there was NO WAY this cool girl actually coming to MY party!” Everyone wanted to take pictures with me—and at least 15 people asked if I was planning to drench the whole party with Faygo later in the night. (I wasn’t.)
You can obviously get cheap Halloween makeup at your local drugstore, but the pros in Hollywood pretty exclusively use cream paint by Ben Nye. The trick to keeping it in place all night long is a healthy coat of colorless setting powder, a miracle product I’d never heard of until 36 hours ago. Combined with a light spritz of matte finish setting spray, my makeup lasted 15+ hours, which is far longer than anyone should legally be wearing this dreadful look anyway.
It may seem like the makeup is the star of the show here, but what really made things so successful was the super tall wig. It added a towering sense of presence that improved everything. If you’ve got a cheap wig that flops over due to lack of internal structure, heed this tip that Madonna’s hairdresser hipped me to years ago: stuff the top of your wig with a crumpled-up brown paper bag. Like magic, it makes any craptastic wig gravity-defying and downright impressive.
The moral of this twisted story? Never underestimate the power of a fright wig and some truly terrible face paint.
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