Halloweekend is fast approaching—info made slightly more exciting seeing as though Halloween is actually on a weekend this year. Huzzah! We're especially fond of October 31 as it's the one holiday that provides everyone with a free pass to try weird new things with their makeup (see also: Reese's Peanut Butter Cups), only now it's with the help of our professional makeup artist pals—check back each day this week for a new tutorial. First up, something vampy:
Fionagh Cush, the Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, just wrapped creating 27 monster looks for the new Goosebumps movie. So when we asked her to create a vampire victim in honor of Halloween, all she said was “Easy.”
She already had some vein-y temporary tattoos—left over from another monster film she worked on recently—which she applied to the face and neck of our model, Jessica [photo 2]. “They make the vampire look that much more realistic—you want the skin to look paper-thin.”
First she prepped the skin with makeup remover, then pressed the tattoo paper against Jessica’s face, dabbing the back with a damp sponge [3, 4]. “You can easily do this without the tattoos.” she notes. “If you have a blueish eye pencil, just draw some veins very lightly where you’d like them to be.” Or you can order from Tattoo Temptation, a veritable emporium of temporary body art, which has a kit complete with three different kinds of veins. However, you have to purchase at least 5 sheets of tattoos to get them to ship to you (which gives you a great excuse to spring for the full Amy Winehouse set).
To hollow out the eyes, Fionagh used a maroon shadow “from the inside of her eye through where we would normally put concealer.” [6]
Next comes the pallor. Fionagh airbrushed Jessica’s face with her Temptu Airpod Foundation in Porcelain. For the gadget-less, a pressed powder in the lightest shade on the spectrum will work just as well. Fionagh then blended the edges of the veins in with the foundation and continued to work with the maroon eye shadow for believably dead eyes. Pat the skin with a cotton pad to set everything in.
“It’s hard to get a dark lip color without it going too magenta,” Fionagh says. Instead, she started with Kat Von D Studded Kiss Lipstick in Poe, a slightly metallic navy. To get her desired blood-drunk ombré, she painted over the blue with the Butter London Lippy gloss in Ruby Murray, a plum red.
Finally, the bite marks [8]. Fionagh used a professional putty called “bondo.” which created three-dimensional indents right on the jugular, and brushed over them with a dark red body paint from a professional visual effects palette. But puncture wounds prove easy to replicate with a tiny paint brush and a tube of lipstick or lip liner. Draw two dots, fang’s width apart, and faintly outline with a circle in the same color. Smear until they look appropriately irritated.
And just like that, you've gone from being alive to being undead. You're also free to order Bloody Marys outside of brunch hours.
Photographed by Tom Newton.
