Five Easy Halloween Makeup Looks

Looking back on IRK’s very own French Cowboy photography editorials, drawing inspiration from the images, we discover best makeup looks for high-impact, low-effort Halloween costumes.

With spooky season soon approaching, it’s time to start thinking of your Halloween costumes. Stuck on what to wear? Makeup is the key to any costume, forget about the clothes and focus on transforming your face instead.

Alien Halloween Makeup looks

The alien is a popular Halloween costume that comes in many forms: the silver-clad extraterrestrial, the freakish ET, the classic green inverse-egg-head alien. We propose a simpler take, the block colour alien. Simply choose a bright-coloured face paint: the traditional luminous green, or maybe a bright blue (think Nebula, Guardians of the Galaxy) or neon pink, and sponge your entire face that shade. In just ten minutes of face painting you’ll be looking out of this world.

Space Girl

Similar but different to the Alien, the space girl is purely a celestial being, dressed in futuristic metallic clothes, with ethereal, glowing makeup.

Try blending a rainbow of shimmery eyeshadows and highlighters around your cheeks and forehead, like a spectrum of rainbow light refracting. Firstly, this look is achieved through whimsical colours and spacey shapes, try drawing some stars on your face and maybe even temporarily dyeing your hair bubblegum pink. Go one step further and add an astronaut helmet to become the ultimate space-explorer.

Doll Halloween Makeup

The simplest of looks, but extremely effective, the key to the doll costume lies in the makeup. Start with a glossy base on the face, using full coverage foundation to achieve a porcelain effect. Then add as much blush as you please, rosy red, unblended on the apples of your cheeks. For the lips, you need a puckered pout: paint a heart shape in hot pink or bright red to match the blush.

The eyes should be big, wide and menacing: think Annabelle from The Conjuring. Use long false lashes and winged black eyeliner. Finally, add a pop of white liner on your waterline for the illusion of huge unblinking dolls eyes.

Mermaid

Another Halloween costume brought to life by makeup is the siren. She is renowned for a face so enchanting, she lures sailors into the water and to their death. Evidently, mesmerising makeup is the key to this look. It needs to be shiny, scaly, encrusted, like you’ve slept on a bed of shells. Lots of highlighter is crucial for the iridescent, pearly effect. Firstly, brush every high structure on the face (nose, cheekbones, cupids bow, inner corner of the eye) with luminous highlighter. Then go over the top with sequins, glitter and stick on pearls, spreading them across your cheekbones and up your forehead. Use plastic free glitter such as SiSi la Pailette.

You can also try laying fishnet tights across your face and using them as a stencil for scales. Brush pastel-coloured eyeshadow through the gaps in the netting and it leaves a reptilian imprint on your skin.

Pilot

The final look is the sun-kissed, leather-clad pilot. For the outfit, you’ll want something form-fitting, a waistcoat top and tight trousers, for example. This Halloween makeup look is incredibly easy, you just need to look like you’ve been flying close to the sun: glowy strokes of bronzer and blush blended all up your cheekbones. The hair should be voluminous and windswept; try a bouncy blow-dry. To finish, you need some aviator goggles, pulled down onto your forehead.