‘Halloween’ A Makeup Artist’s favorite time of year!

Halloween for a Makeup Artist is bigger than Thanksgiving and Christmas combined.  I start thinking about my Halloween costume as soon as summer ends, sometimes even sooner 😉

Growing up, my house was the one on the street that all the trick-or-treaters wanted to go to.   The front lawn was transformed into a graveyard, a strobe light was going off blinding anyone that came near and my dad would jump out and scare the kids with a frightful mask on his face.

Needless to say Halloween has always been a big deal for me.

Whenever I start to brainstorm Halloween ideas I love to go back and look at costumes from previous years.

Here is when I was a scary doll:

 I once made my friend up as Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean:

Last year I made my husband up as Stu the Dentist from the Hangover series:

My best costume to date was my Lady Gaga costume from 2010.  I worked with Lady Gaga in 2008 for her first concert in Canada.

I did her hair and makeup and I had a reporter from The Toronto Star contact me because he was doing an article on the top costumes for Halloween.

Lady Gaga was at the peak of her career in ’10 and caused a lot of buzz by wearing her infamous Meat dress to the MTV Video Music Awards that year.

In the article I talk about my encounter with Lady Gaga and I mention how I planned to dress up as Lady G for Halloween.  Here is the article:

About two weeks after that article was published I received a phone call from the producer of The Today Show-Yes the ACTUAL Today show!  I thought someone was playing a prank on me!  The producer explained that they were doing a piece for their website about Pop Culture influenced Halloween Costumes.  She mentioned how she stumbled across the Toronto Star article and was interested to see some photos of my Lady Gaga costume.  I was floored!  I couldn’t believe I was being asked this.  I only had some elements of the costume so I had to run all over the city to find the finishing touches like a wig and tights.  And on top of that I had to find a professional photographer to take some shots of me in my costume (a selfie from my iPhone would just not cut it).  Luckily my friend Steve Alkok was available to snap some photos of me.

I purchased a T-bone steak from BuyCostumes.com as well as Gaga glasses.  The wig I got from a beauty supply store in Toronto called Ragga Hair.  The arm fishnets I picked up at Dollarama and the costume jewelry I luckily had just laying around.

For the makeup I just did a simple smoky eye and a red lip-Ruby Woo from MAC Cosmetics.  Lady Gaga wore similar makeup for the MTV Video Awards.  It truly was all about the meat anyhow!  For the slab of meat on my head I just cut out the picture from the packaging of the costume.

I even made a meat purse by cutting out a bunch of pictures of the steak section from a local grocery store flyer and pasted them to a cheap purse.

To me Halloween is all about being creative and crafty.  There is nothing more satisfying then seeing a costume come together.  For this year I celebrated Halloween a little early at my niece and nephew’s Halloween party held last weekend.  I went as a Mexican Sugar Skull.  I will be doing a blog about how to recreate this look very soon, stay tuned!

Oh and….