The Transformation of Zippergash Girl

 Every year, my best friend has a Halloween party.  She always wants people to dress up for it, and while I love this idea in theory, in practice, there are some issues due to the fact that costuming someone of my size isn't all that easy. However, this year, I really wanted to participate (as something besides a fortune teller or Honey Boo Boo), but I knew I needed to do some planning. My roommate and I debated ideas/time/skill levels for a few days, trying come up with a costume that was not insulting, reasonably easy to do, affordable, and able to handle the fact that I would be traveling for half an hour to get to this party.

A day or so after the discussion began, he found a costume idea on Pinterest for a creating the illusion of having your skin zippered onto . . . and it coming undone. I loved the idea completely and we began to make it happen.

The process is rather simple and doesn't involve a lot of stuff. As you can see, I basically needed some Halloween makeup, a zipper, and eyelash adhesive. He also bought some spray on zombie blood to add to the gore factor.

Two tubes of makeup were purchased because all of the reds he could find were very bright red and worked great for clowns, not so much for creating open flesh wounds. The brown was purchased so I could darken the red and find a nice level of ick.

 I will say that one of the mistakes I made was not experimenting with the makeup soon enough. I waited until a day or so before the party before I really messed with blending it and testing the texture. I shouldn't have done that because I ended up having to make some alterations.

You'll notice several things in this picture. The red is VERY red . . . the brown is nicely dark, but lacks the right tones to really be gory. Blending it works much better.  The problem is, the makeup was very soft.  As soon as I started messing with it, I realized there was no way it was going to survive me eating and drinking.

So the morning before the party, we end up at Walmart so we can buy a shorter zipper and some more stable makeup.  Instead of doing the bottom half of my face as the opened zipper part, I do my forehead. It's less dramatic, but easier to handle and more practical in terms of being at a party where I'm eating.

Keep in mind that before you start doing any type of makeup or application on your face, it's a very good idea to get the rest of your outfit on. I know this means that you risk getting makeup on it, but it's far easier to toss something over your clothes to keep them clean as you work than to try and put on a bra when you have a zipper glued to your forehead.

So this is how things looked before I started. I did my usual makeup on the lower part of my face, but left my forehead clean. You'll notice in this picture that I have stray hair going just about everywhere. When you are doing any kind of makeup like this, hair is a bitch. Just find any way you can to keep it out of your face and proceed from there.
 The next step was to take my eyebrow pencil and make the boarder of where I could put my wound. I held the zipper in place on my forehead and marked the inside of it with the eyeliner. Any kind of makeup coming into contact with my adhesive might cause it to not stick. It really wasn't worth the risk.




I should note it's a good idea to keep babywipes or a washcloth with you as you do this. Even if you are good at staying in the lines (which I am not), mistakes can always happen. Especially when you have cats trying to distract you.

I started with the brown pancake makeup first. I soon discovered that one of the problems with the brown was that it had a lot of yellow undertones. It was making the whole thing come off less red and more orange. I ended up using the softer makeup from the first day to try and blend out some of that orange.

 I added the red next. I did a base coat of the pancake red and then took a couple of paint brushes and added in some darker tones.  One paint brush was very thin and used for lines. The other one was thicker and I feathered over the 'wound' to try and give it some more dimension. This part is always a guessing game. First you have too much red, then it looks too brown. At one point, you just have to accept that it is as good as it's going to be.

 My roommate suggested I add the adhesive to the zipper itself and just place it that way. The glue wasn't easy, but it did work. He ended up placing it for me, which worked up for the better. We had to cut off the very edges, because they were going to glue into my hair.

After we had it glued on, I stopped until I got to the party. Honestly, I think the trip over there helped. It gave me some time to make sure the glue was going to hold. I talked and moved with it on, and honestly if it was going to rip off, it would have done it during that.  It also had a lot of time to dry before the last step of this process, which was adding the splatters of blood.

As you can see, my blood splatters had some issues. It sprayed out kind of gloppy, and I had to use a paint brush to get it to drip down. This took away from some of the organic nature of it. However, I still ended up with a nice zippered up wound on my forehead.  For me, a good costume.  One that I could afford, accomplish, and complete. And, quite honestly, one I had a lot of fun with.