Costume Makeup - Applying Localized Fake Hair

Emily: Hi I am Emily at Masters Costumes in Arlington, Virginia. I am showing you how to do scurvy pirate face today. So, we have applied a pre-formed hair prosthetic to clean shaven Jay here and I still dont think he looks hairy enough.

So, I am going to show you how to do a more localized application of hair. You want to get a type of synthetic hair, if you have got a wig, thats already got a lot of hair coming down off of it, then if you snip a little bit on the underneath part, its going to give the most matching effect.

If you are just doing the hair by itself, this is the product called Crepe Wool hair and this comes in a braid and you will notice when it comes out it is all crimped. What I have done is, I have ironed this very briefly on a steam setting. You dont need a lot of heat. It is wool but once you have it as straight as you need it to be then you can pull it off in pieces and you can use this at any length. You can cut this really small and build it up upon layers.

The main thing is that you leave a nice clean layer for you to attach it with. So, you can make these as long as you need them to be, you can always build layers if you need them to be lot longer. However, if you want it just in a single strand like this, then just make sure that the end is all even, so that you have a nice surface to work with when you are applying it with the gum. So, I go ahead and just trim that so that I have nice straight line. You can prepare any type of crepe hair in advance. Lets say you wanted to do braids, you want to add some bead stuff to make you look like particularly famous pirates then you could that ahead of time and then adhere them the same way that I applied the pre-made prosthetic and I will show you how I do that now.

We have a nice surface there, and this we are going to get a little bit of spirit gum on your hand but dont worry because we also have spirit gum remover. The spirit gum comes with the remover, if not, then you should be able to purchase it in the same place.

So, we are kind of going to do a goatee effect right here. Just going to put a little glob, since we are just doing one layer, if we were doing more than one layer then we want to go ahead and build that up.

Once again, this is being applied to a clean face. Its going to press those hairs into the skin and you can even seal it little bit with more spirit gum. You always want to start with the bottom layer and then work your way up, build on top of that.

Some on skin, kind of made these into a little point so that they look real hard core and trim the edge so that you have nice flat line there. And make sure they are even and then just press up, up right in there.

You dont need to work with the whole bunch at a time. You dont want to end up with hair and glue all over yourself. Im little bit ahead of time, its going to be enough to handle. Especially if you are doing a full beard but this will be the most realism for you and give you the most localized application of the hair.

Once that dries, we can just put make up right over that dried spirit gum and it should not affect the make up too much.

Next, we are going to work with make up techniques to pull this whole look together and show you how to create a stubble for your beard.