Costume Makeup - Applying a Fake Mustache

Emily: Hi, I am Emily and we are here at Masters Costumes in Arlington, Virginia and we are about to show you how to turn any one into a scurvy zombie pirate. We are going to start out really small.

First we are going to start with hair, most pirates are not clean shaven like Jay is, So we are going to show you how to work with a pre-made hair prosthetic and later will show you how to do localized hair like crape hair.

But the product you are going to be using to adhere anything to your skin is going to be spirit gum. Its a really great flesh adhesive. Its basically glue for your skin and you can buy prosthetics that vary in degrees of quality at any theatrical supply store or most Halloween stores carry them around this time of year.

So, they are going to come out of the package, looking like this. You have basically got a mesh netting with little individual hairs set in. This particular brand comes kind of gel bound, so what you can do if you are going to be messing with the style is just break that gel right out and its not going to change it too much.

Its just making it so that its a more natural looking for you. Each one of these hairs is really well attached to the back mesh. So, if you needed to adjust the size of this, you could do that. I always recommend when using a prosthetic to hold it up where you are going to be putting it and if you need to trim it at all, you could do that at this time.

I always start at the top so you dont accidentally take away too much off and then you end up with a pencil pen moustache. You want it to be pretty full and gross and nasty looking because our pirate today is going to be very unkempt and not clean shaven, the way our model is.

So, we have a latex appliance, I apply the spirit gum to it but with a hair appliance or anything with the mesh back round, I will not be applying the spirit gum to the piece, I will be applying it to the skin. So, once again you can go ahead and hold that up and just get a feel for where exactly its going to be touching. You have got a lot of elasticity in this area here. So you are going to move around, you are going to be eating, its always really good to be very strategic with the placement of your spirit gum.

So, I usually find out placing a little here and a little here. Its usually where its going to be touching your skin the most. You dont want to get this on your lips. Its not necessary to have it set that low.

You want it to be right here under your nose and its going to go on a lot like nail polish. Really thin with the brush, efforts you are going to notice that its pretty runny and its not very sticky. After about a minute though, its going to start to really dry and become whats called tacky, you see how thats starting to get more and more sticky. So, that is good because it gives you lot of time to kind of play with the placement of prosthetic and its not going to dry right away.

So, if you dont get the right first time then you can mess with it a little bit. As you can see that always a virtue. And we are applying this to a clean face. We are going to do any make up effects, any gore effects, anything like that is going to take place after all prosthetics have been applied. So, always apply prosthetic to clean face.

The mesh should be pretty much invisible, ones its down. You can go over that thing with make up. This is going to probably take about five minutes to dry. So, we are going to go ahead and let that dry. We can speed the process by fanning it, you can even take a hair dryer to it, if you would like.

And after thats dry, we are going to show you how to do a localized hair application with just a few strands of hair.