If you’re looking for last-minute costume ideas, we’ve got you covered.
Americans are estimated to spend $3.8 billion on Halloween costumes this year, according to the National Retail Federation.
On top of that, your costume may need some special effects makeup to complete the look.
Experts from Bloomington’s Tricoci University beauty school created three simple, cost-effective Halloween looks.
Spooky spider
Erin Carter and Addison Bailey created a slashed spider look with liquid latex and plastic spiders from Spirit Halloween, googly eyes, pipe cleaners and toilet paper.
“For her neck slash, I did liquid latex,” Carter said. “You just do a couple layers of toilet paper, maybe three or four, to get more of a fleshy look, and then you add [stage] blood and cut through it.”
The look took about an hour to do. She ranks the difficulty of the look a three out of 10.
“If you can cut paper and paste paper, you can do neck slashes,” she said.
Circus ringmaster
Estheticians Seraphina Duncan and Miranda Temples created a ringmaster look to complement an already detailed costume.
“She has all of her cards on display, and we really just accent with some triangles, some red, circusy fun and some diamonds,” Duncan said.
They applied the face gems with spirit gum, a skin-safe adhesive sold at Halloween stores. They also used facepaint
Duncan said the look took about 40 minutes to complete. She ranks it a two out of 10 for difficulty.
Rainbow clown
Allie Phillips and Ryn Keplinger worked on a not-so-scary clown look using white face paint, wax makeup crayons and eyelashes from Spirit Halloween, paired with everyday makeup items such as lip liner and bold eyeshadows for the accent colors.
Phillips said this look takes an hour to an hour-and-a-half to complete and gave it a medium difficulty rating.
“It's not crazy hard, just make sure your base is solid,” she said. “The base is the hardest, that white foundation is not easy.”
The two used a mix of water-activated paint and cream paint to create the foundation and recommend using small detail brushes for creating shapes with hard edges.
