Thread: first time prosthetic user here

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hi, my girfriend and I plan on being imps for Halloween and I was hoping for some detailed help with the makeup. I know I'll need grease makeup but how much per person? It will be needed for our entire heads and possibly our hands if that's pssible. Sorry for the bad spelling. I'm writig this on my phone.

I don't have any tips for applying it, because that depends on the character and the makeup. But if you get good theater makeup, they provide step by step instructions. (Mehron and Ben Nye are pretty good, and have excellent instructions on their websites.) That's my biggest piece of advice: don't visit some cheesy store and pick up a card of cheap makeup. It will end up all over your clothes and smeared beyond recognition. Get good makeup, follow the instructions, and set it with powder, especially if you're putting it on your hands.

Good makeup also makes blending in appliances much easier.

Here's a little bit of information on greasepaint application for rubber appliance makeups...

Rubber appliances will deteriorate when exposed to mineral oil, which is present in most cream makeup bases. In the 1930's, Max Factor developed a special greasepaint for use on rubber makeups, called "rubber mask greasepaint" or "rubber mask grease." Still in use to this day, it contained castor oil instead of mineral oil as the main vehicle for the pigment because the castor oil would not absorb into the rubber and rot it.

If you are unable to get a rubber mask grease, you can modify a cream makeup base (like a Ben Nye, or a Stein's) by mixing it with castor oil (about 40% oil to 60% makeup base...but experiment a little to get something that works for you). This will counteract the mineral oil's ability to soak into the rubber.

An even better version of this would be to use stage pancake makeup, scrape it out of the cake and crush it fine, and then add some castor oil to that. Cake makeup generally contains little or no mineral oil, and mixed with castor oil, will give you an even more inert makeup base.

Once your base has been applied to both rubber and skin, you can use cream lining colors to add highlights and shadows; then powder liberally with talc, and once the excess oils are absorbed and the makeup is "set," you can take a soft sponge dipped in water and cleanse the excess powder off the greasepaint. This will restore the vibrancy of the colors somewhat and alleviate the "powdered" look somewhat...

Good luck with your makeups, and have fun!

Rodd Matsui

Here's a few more notes on rubber mask grease...the idea of it... Making rubber prosthetics is a convenient way to change your appearance. But rubber by itself does not reflect light as skin does; skin is translucent and glows from within, whereas rubber appliances are basically opaque.

Rubber mask grease, ideally, is a highly opaque paint which when applied to both skin and rubber, cause both to reflect light the same. So, whatever you mix up should be highly pigmented. Adding too much castor oil, for example, will allow you to see through the paint, and you don't want that.

One example of something you can mix up at home...for a greenish goblin-skin type effect, you can first mix a color incorporating a skin-tone makeup base, like a Ben Nye, and a strong green lining color. This will give you something green, but not quite a cartoonish green, more of a naturalistic, avocado green. Setting some of this base aside and mixing it with more dark green and black will give you a shadow color; with lighter colors, a highlight.

Once the color is right, you can then see about mixing an appropriate amount of castor oil into the base. (Usually, the smaller batches of highlight and shadow color do not need to be modified with the castor oil, because they are used in smaller quantities and only on top of the base color.)

Since any paint will be translucent if you apply it thinly enough, you'll need to make sure your application of rubber mask grease is sufficiently thick. Usually, a good opaque application of rubber mask grease (often patted on with a white rubber makeup sponge) will look rather shiny and greasy, and the heavy powdering will both matte the surface out and greatly reduce smearing.