Showcase: Halloween Skull Make Up

Just a quick post as I wanted to share a few shots of the skull make up I decided to do for a Halloween party last night.

The party was at late notice and I didn't have a costume, so I started thinking about what look could I create with make up that's significant enough to stand alone as my Halloween look. I've never done anything like this sort of make up before so I really wanted to put myself to the test and see how it came out.

Unfortunately due to the short time span and lack of knowing whether I would look completely ridiculous, I didn't manage to create a tutorial for this, but I'll mention what products I've used nevertheless.


The white base was just a cheap white liquid face paint I picked up in Clinton's, set with a white eyeshadow powder over the top. For the shading I used Urban Decay's Naked palette as it has a great range of matte black, grey, creams and browns. I drew the basic shapes our with a fine dusting of the eyeshadow with a fine detail brush so I could make sure I was getting my shapes right before committing to them with my black gel eyeliner.


The key is to follow the bone structure of your face and try your best to recreate the bones that a skull has - including a jaw separate from the rest of the skull. I shaded my teeth in on one edge of each tooth to help give them a 3d effect.

I'd suggest using browns as well as greys for shading, as skulls are more of a creamy brown colour than white and grey, but of course you need some grey and black to really make those vital shadows really pop.


Try and get the black of the eye sockets as close to your eyes as possible and in photos it can be quite effective to shut your eyes.

Overall I was really pleased with how this skull look came out and I can't wait to try more elaborate make up like this in the future. If you do want to give it a go, my main suggestions are to:

1 - find some inspiration pictures of make up and real skulls

2 - dedicate significant time to this look; to get some really precise shading and opaque you're going to need a long time unless you're some sort of crazy super make up artist. From start to finish this look took me almost an hour and a half.