Emily: Hi! I am Emily, I am at Masters Costumes in Arlington, Virginia doing a demonstration on how to apply a cat face for your Halloween cat costume. What we have done so far is we have applied a cat nose muzzle prosthetic to Heathers face, we have applied it with spirit gum which is a flesh adhesive and then we used liquid latex to seal the edges. I am now going to show you how to apply makeup effects and to really accentuate the cats skull structure. There is a lot of manipulation involved, the prosthetic allows us to have the muzzle and also widens the bridge of the nose a little bit. So, we will not have to use makeup to achieve that, we are just going to accentuate it with the makeup. So, what we really going to focus on is effects and also the difference between applying makeup to a prosthetic and applying makeup to actual skin.

So, what we have is, we have completely clean palate, make sure that your face is completely clean and the prosthetic will be the first thing you apply. So, no makeup beforehand, the latex itself -- the liquid latex has dried, even though you can still see the white color. When you touch it, it is dried, it doesnt stick, it doesnt come off on your fingers so you know that it is dry enough, so then apply the castor sealer. Castor sealer is a wonderful product; it is an oil that can be used on the piece to actually moisturize the piece, if you think of latex as a false skin as a second skin then you can imagine that it needs an oil supply just like normal skin has. If I was to draw a line of makeup on the prosthetic right now, on the dry prosthetic onto the skin, you would see that the color would be different, it would just adhere differently because this is basically dead skin as opposed to living skin which is what we want to recreate with the prosthetic. So, we are going to take a little bit of castor sealer and you can use the brush or you can use your fingers and we dont want to be too rough with the prosthetic because we dont to pull it off or obliterate the seal. We are really just going to coat the whole thing in the castor sealer and we are also going to coat the edges where the liquid latex has dried and set because that also needs some moisture supply. You can do this before you apply prosthetic maybe even let it set overnight with a layer of castor sealer on it, obviously the longer you let the moisture set on the more moisturized the piece is going to become. The reason I havent done in this instance is because if you accidentally get it on the opposite side of the prosthetic, the spirit gum wont stick to it and that just going to be longer, more tedious for you to do. So, we just wait until the afterward spurts and put it on then and coat the liquid latex at the same time.

Now once again you cant let this sit on for up to 10 minutes, put it on very generously any place we ere using, there is going to be makeup applied. On a pre-painted prosthetic such as this, theres is going to be minimal makeup. However, if you have a clean prosthetic with no air brushed effects, then you are probably going to be painting the whole thing. Either way it is almost likely that it is not going to aim at your skin tone or be the color that you are going to be, if you are going to black cat; obviously this nose would not be good as it is. So, we would have to paint it anyway. Now I am basically putting a very generous layer on here. This is basically castor oil so it is pretty safe for your skin. We are putting on generously and then what we are going to do is we are going to wipe off the excess, you can leave it set for about 10 minutes, I usually find that 1-5 minutes is a pretty good amount of time to wait. Since we are going to be doing other makeup effects, I will just go ahead and dab off the excess now. You want to be a little shiny and just be super careful, you dont want it to tug at the prosthetic too much. If the edges come up obviously it will be lot harder to stick them down, if those edges do become saturated with the castor sealer, no adhesive is going to stick to it or latex. That is how you apply the castor sealer to achieve a moisturized skin look on your prosthetic. Next we will be applying the makeup and showing you some different techniques for whatever kind of cat you want to be for Halloween.