Today For You, Tomorrow For Me!

If I'm not doing weddings, I love doing costume makeup, especially theatrical. It's a talent to make someone look like a character and the results can be astounding! Last week I entered a Project Broadway competition in which models were transformed to resemble a character from leading Broadway musicals. I was ecstatic to join this project, especially when my team of three cosmetologists and an esthetician pulled RENT as our musical. We chose the character Angel and had the perfect model, Haley, to begin our transformation.

The goal was challenging. I needed to transform Haley, a woman, into a man who dresses as a woman. For work like this, concealers and contours are essential! I applied a foundation three shades darker than Haley's natural skin tone to get her skin to a darker ethnicity more similar to Angel's background. Her brows were thickened and sharply defined with a deep brown eyebrow pencil. Her eyes were going to be one of the most defined features for this look. I used darker mattes to accentuate her eye into an elongated shape and filled in her crease to deeply set her eyes. 

Men who dress like women are all about highlighting! For Haley, I used a white eye pencil (Milk by NYX) right under her brow to the crease and went over it with a shimmery white pigment. Two sets of lashes were used for her eyes. The part that changed her the most, however, was contouring. I took a darker powder and an angled face brush and darkly shaded a sharp line into her cheek bones and along her neck to create the shadow of an adam's apple. The five o'clock shadow was created with brown powder eyeshadow through facial gauze and an eyebrow pencil lightly shaded to create a double chin. And for her finishing touches, I used a bright red lip liner and lipstick with dabs of white eyeshadow in the center of her pout with a clear gloss overcoat to make her lips fuller.

Here was our finished look! The fabulous Haley as Angel from RENT

The entire project was a blast to work on and the best part was that our fabulous team came in second place for our efforts!