Okay, well, in some cases, it IS the celebration. My family has become quite skilled at fucking me over on my actual birthday, so Halloween is the chance to get shitfaced and hang out with drag queens to make up for the craptasticness from two days before.
Anyway, I had a hard time for a while figuring out what I wanted to be this year. Kourt settled on pirate quite a while back, but I was a pirate three years ago and I didn't want to recycle it.
Then, in a moment of sheer inspiration that came while I was in the bathroom at WalMart at 2am, I decided on the perfect costume: JEM!
In some ways, it's a simple costume to put together. If you get the hair, eye makeup, and earrings right, the rest just has to be pastel, 80s, and girly. Since it's been quite a few years since I saw an episode of Jem, I looked up some images just so I could be sure I was getting it right.
While google image searching Jem, I discovered that lots of people like to dress up as Jem for Halloween. And lots of people end up looking horrible in the process. You can't just grab any old pink wig, throw on the first 80s-ish outfit you can think of, and be done with it. The hair, especially, is crucial. It's not bright hot pink. It's very pale pink. In fact, in the cartoon it's almost white most of the time. And most of your run of the mill inexpensive pink costume wigs are more like neon fuchsia. Plus, her hair was a huge 80s pseudo-mullet, and they simply don't make pink wigs that come anywhere close in style or sheer volume of hair.
See, this is Jem's hair:
These are NOT Jem's hair:
It became obvious quite quickly that if I were to really pull off a good Jem costume, I'd have to put some time and effort into the wig. A little research uncovered the fact that you CAN color a synthetic wig with some rubbing alcohol and a few sharpie markers. (Thank you, cosplayers!) So Kourt and I took a trip to the Halloween store and I picked up this wig:
I also picked up a package of doll hair, a handful of pink sharpies, and a bottle of alcohol. Over the past week I've been cutting the proper layers into the wig and sewing the resulting loose wig hair (as well as the doll hair when needed) back into the wig to give it the proper shape and volume.
Oh, and while I worked on the wig, I watched every episode of the cartoon on YouTube. I didn't actually intend to do that -- I just started watching for research purposes. But it turns out the show is remarkably fun to watch, even after all these years.
Anyway, it still needs a good finishing trim and a lot styling (I want all the ends to curl under), but in the end I think I've got it just right:
I know it's hard to tell from small, sideways pics of the disheveled wig with nothing there to gauge the scale, but it's a whole hell of a lot of hair. It comes just short of armpit length in the back, and it's about twice as thick as the original wig.
I say not bad for my first attempt at working with a wig like that.
I've played around with the makeup part, and I think I've got that down. It's not difficult, it's just very... pink.
Next step: the Jem star earrings. I haven't quite figured out the ideal material out of which to make them, but they shouldn't be hard to pull off.
Oh, and I found the perfect pair of shoes at the secondhand store for $4: A pair of pale aqua pumps -- you know, the kind you can have dyed to match bridesmaids dresses and such? Looks like they were worn once with a hideous bridesmaid's dress and never worn again. Jackpot!
This Halloween is going to be truly outrageous.
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