The makings of an emo zombie (long, w/pics)
The costume that I finally went with was emo!zombie, aka a large experiment in special effects makeup, aka I am a terrible person and I am going to hell. (Seriously, they are going to add a circle in hell for Those That Mock and I will spend eternity there, with no Golden Boy peanuts. [If you get that joke, you are awesome.]) So... my costume is probably offensive, but I find it funny. For the record, I don't care if you want to wear tons of eyeliner and listen to music that I personally find crappy, but I draw the line at glamorizing self-harm. Maybe next year I will keep with my super classy theme and be heroin chic zombie or something.
Warning-- the lj cut below leads to pictures of (fake) slit wrists and an explanation of how the effect is achieved. However, it is realistic looking enough to make at least one person feel nauseous, which I guess means I did a pretty good job.
So the first step in becoming emo!zombie is to become emo, and this requires that you take several MySpace shots. I make this emo shit look good.
As my coworker said, I was "wearing enough eyeliner to suck 10 dicks." Yes, I know that doesn't make any sense.
Now for the fun part. I painted on a strip of liquid latex (mixed with a tiny amount of fake blood to give it the right color).
Then, after it dried, I very carefully took a butter knife and worked it under the edges of the strip, making a sort of "channel" of fake skin where the slit would be. The important part here is to not actually cut yourself. Then I dusted it with baby powder to lighten the color. It matched my skin tone pretty well, as you can see.
Then, I painted the bottom of the "slit" with greasepaint-- a layer of red, a layer of maroon, and then black along the edges to give the appearance of depth.
...add some fake blood...
...do some standard zombie face makeup (I used expired concealer, white cream makeup, + a touch of green for the base), and presto! Emo zombie. For yoooooou!
Closeup on my "slit wrist" from Saturday, which was probably the best one that I did. Also you will note that emo!zombie did this correctly, that is, "down the street, not across the block." This is why she is emo zombie, and not emo chick in the hospital. Anyway, sorry all of these pictures are not great quality; they are from my phone, as I could not find my memory card reader to get ones off of my camera.