Mystique Costume Evolution

With Halloween being one of my favorite holidays of the year I opted for a challenging costume. Who better than Mystique from X-men? Afterall, she's creepy, hot, and an absolute badass.

Finally settling on a combination of Byran Singer's X-men film version and one of the comic book versions, I immediately began gathering the necessary pieces of my costume together by mid-September. I even commissioned a friend to sew the top for me!

For the various pieces I ordered the contacts from Clearly Contacts, while the rest of the make up, I purchased at the local costume shop. The scales pieces themselves were hand cut from dry blue acrylic paint and liquid latex. The piece itself took well over three hours to put together but well worth the effort.

 To see the results and a makeup tutorial, see below.

Mystique Costume Evolution!!

Make up list of must have and approximate timing.

A party of characters.

(Order of left to right)
Goth, Emma Frost, Wolverine, Mystique, Lucha Libre, Lady de Renaissance, and Clark Kent
Photo taken by Ira Malinich, the official photographer at the party my friends and I attended.
I'm assuming he was an official photographer anyway... he had big camera.

A Wolverine and a Mystique.

I searched high and low for a video that explained how to go about doing the make up. In my humble option this video was the best.

Halloween Special Part 1

Halloween, one of the oldest holidays second to Christmas that dates back two thousand years to a Celtic festival known as Samhains. The Celts that occupied what is now Northern France and the United Kingdom held the belief that the evening prior to their new year (November 1) the boundary between the land of the dead and the living would blur. The spirits of the dead would return to the world of the living causing mischief and mayhem to crops and the like. However it was believed that the presence of these spirits would grant Celtic priest's visions of the future. To celebrate these predictions the people would come together for a bonfire where they would sacrifice animals and burn crops, while wearing animal heads and skins.

While the vast majority of us are less likely to go parading around in animal heads, the opportunity of dressing up as something or somebody else with a bunch of other people is just too good to pass up. And if you're someone like me, the process of creating the costume is just as fun as dressing up.

This year I decided to go as the corpses bride. A decision that was solely based on saving money since I already had the wedding dress from a previous costume. In summary I never did save as much money as I had hoped. If anything what I saved in the costume I ended up spending in make up and accessories. No regrets though since the result looks amazing!  See below.

The pile of make up and supplies including rubbing alcohol, rotting flesh prosthetics, various blue, grey, black eye shadows and black eyeliner, white cream and a pair wicked eyelashes.

A wig that I constructed by hand. It took and obscene amount of time, effort and yarn to make this nightmare of a wig. Looking back I should have forked over the $25 for the corpses' bride wig than go through the misery of wasting so much time on braiding this stupid thing.

Was strongly debating whether or not the fact eye lashes coupled with the flesh wound was too much. In the end I thought, go big or go home.

The completed picture after an hour of applying make up. There are a few kinks I need to work out but I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

My version of the corpses bride has a bit more gore than Tim Burtons'. If you're more interested in the elegant version there is a good video on youtube made by audfaced. However if it's all blood and guts that appeases your appetite be sure to check out the following link, which provides a list of supplies and videos needed for applying zombie make up.

That's it for now.

P.S- Full costume will be featured on Halloween.