I was inspired to do this costume when I came across the cool latex Medusa headpiece at my local Costume Castle branch. I was slightly embarrassed to try it on because one of the store attendants was kind of hovering around me (and being a little flirty) and of course Medusa is a female character. I thought a male Gorgon would probably work, however, and finally trying on the headpiece when she left me alone for a moment confirmed my thinking (she also reappeared at this point and made encouragement noises). Note, by the way, that one male Gorgon does reportedly appear in Greek mythology — Nanas, the guard of Zeus.
When I wore my costume, I spirit-gummed the edges of the headpiece to my face to keep it in place. Unfortunately this Don Post Medusa headpiece appears to be discontinued, but there's now a very similar one apparently made by Mask Illusions and distributed by Rubie's (though it doesn't seem to appear on the latter site). If I were ever to want to do this costume again, I'd need to buy that new headpiece, since though I stored mine on a wig form, it has become somewhat deformed by gravity over the years and the latex has become stiff and crispy.
For my green skin, this being very early in my career of doing full makeup with my costumes, I used what was available to me at my local costume shops, which was water-based cream makeup. At least I did use a pro brand, Mehron. I knew that getting it to not rub off was going to be an issue, especially since I wanted to make up my hands, and the best you can do with water-based makeup is to use a fixer spray over it. This was available at one of my local shops, so I did this. The fixer spray betrays a bit of shine in the above shot.
The makeup stayed just fine on places like my face where it wasn't being touched, but on other places it did rub off over the course of the day. It rubbed off pretty badly on my neck, but since this produced a look kind of like snake scales, it was not as bad as it might have been:
Actually, one of the reasons it looks like snake scales there is that I had been touching up patches where the makeup had rubbed off of my neck using Rubie's green nail polish. Yes, nail polish, and no, I do not recommend putting nail polish directly on your skin (though it worked fine and only felt a little stiff once it dried). I had rejected the nail polish for use on my nails because the opaque look looked like, well, nail polish (more on my hand makeup in a moment), but it was certainly convenient for doing touch-ups to my skin since it came in its own small, pocketable bottle and had the brush built in for no mess; plus, I knew it wouldn't come off, so I wouldn't have to do any repeat touch-ups where it had been applied. Because the makeup continued to come off around these patches, however, they ended up standing out more than the base makeup and took on that scale look.
For my lips, I knew that talking, drinking, and eating would take a toll on the cream makeup, plus I wouldn't be able to apply that to the inner part of my lips, so I planned to use some Wet 'n' Wild Lip Tricks green lipstick I had bought at a local drug store. At least, I thought it was green lipstick, as would anyone reading the name of the particular color, Mean Green. Unfortunately the Lip Tricks line was apparently one where the lipstick would magically take on a completely different color than the stick when applied to your lips, in this case a pale-ish red color. (I would think a line of mystery colors would be a tough sell for lipstick, and I am not surprised to see that Wet 'n' Wild has discontinued the Lip Tricks line.) I had waited until the morning of putting on my costume to try the lipstick (since I figured I didn't have any other choice on it, not having found any other green lipstick in the local stores), but luckily I had another option: permanent marker.
Well, hang on, not just any permanent marker! 
Using the
normal type of solvent-based permanent marker on your lips would probably not
be a very wise idea, and would likely be, well, "temporarily permanent".
However, there's another type of permanent marker that uses a water-based
ink, as exemplified by the Dixon RediSharp Plus, and research had indicated
that this ink would be non-toxic and could be washed off. As I recall, the
only place the marker didn't wash off easily was on some chapped parts of my
lips where there was some dead skin, but just rubbing that off prevented me
from having to live with partially green lips for a few days (at the expense
of a little rawness).
And before I leave the discussion of my mouth, I should mention that the previous shot also has a nice view of the custom fangs I first wore with my vampire costume the year before (that page under construction). I'd had some regret that I'd gotten quad fangs rather than standard canine-only ones, since it made them blend in more with the rest of my teeth, but when using the fangs for other costumes, such as this one, this was actually a plus since they don't cry out "vampire!" as much as would standard dual fangs.
Now, as one would expect, my hands were the most challenging place to keep makeup from rubbing off. I experimented with a few different things without too much success, including using Zauder's green colored hair spray (which stayed on okay once dry, but was extremely water soluble) and green food coloring (which, after soaking my hand in some, would roll off my skin like water off a duck's back, leaving just a bit of stain in skin creases and a more permanent stain on the edge of a healing paper cut). What I ended up doing was painting the back of my hand (which wasn't being rubbed very much) with the cream makeup, and coloring the entire inside surface of my hands with the water-based permanent marker. As you can see from the following photo, this definitely stayed on better than the cream makeup on my neck.
I didn't color my entire hands because the shade of green of the RediSharp Plus didn't quite match the Mehron makeup. Also maintaining ink flow while drawing on the skin was somewhat challenging, so it would have been difficult to do my entire neck (had I been able to predict how much the makeup would get rubbed off there). The ink also did come off a bit — not in a way to leave bare patches behind, but in a way to leave marks on things. It especially did this in response to sweat. Therefore, I had to be a bit careful when touching things such as the president's hand here:
(yes, I have no doubt Bill Clinton was making behind-closed-doors deals with Gorgons during his time in office). I didn't leave any permanent stains on anything, though — there were some green marks on my keyboard and mouse at work, but these did come off.
Of course I didn't use my mouse and keyboard as much as I would on a normal workday, not just because part of the day was devoted to the costume party, but also because my contacts did not allow me to read normal- or small-sized fonts on my screen. It's not that they were the wrong prescription for me — my distance vision went out as far as usual, and moving my eyes closer to the screen did not help much. The problem is that the lenses are special "toric" ones thickened at the top and bottom to help keep the cat eye iris oriented up-and-down rather than drifting into a diagonal or horizontal orientation. This thickening killed my detail vision. The contacts looked really cool, though, and were otherwise comfortable. Note that if you look closely enough at contacts such as these, you can see the real iris color through the clear hole in the middle. Also, with the Wild Eyes lenses, you can see that the pattern is a somewhat low-resolution bitmap.
Rounding out my outfit, there's the (crappy thin polyester) monk's robe (which, strangely, was the Plus Size version, even though I am an average-sized guy; also, no idea why it was called a "Monk Universe Robe" — did they mean to say "Universal"?), the brown T-shirt (a freebie from the short-lived local Tower Alternative store), the medallion (a cheesy thing made of rubber, but the half-assed paint job made it look more like a real old weathered piece than an alternate, superficially more presentable plastic one I'd bought), my snake belt (the gift shop that was at the end of the late, lamented Kingdom of the Dinosaurs ride at Knott's had a great variety of rubber snakes, making it was easy to find one I could use as a belt when I attended Knott's Halloween Haunt that year), my olive green socks (which were not meant to mimic my green flesh color), and my sandals (which I'm a bit ashamed to say were modern, if nondescript, ones made of black rubber and nylon — they worked just fine for the costume, but nowadays I would get some more period-looking leather ones).
People loved my costume at work. My project leader kept halting midsentence during our team meeting, though, saying that my costume was kind of freaking him out (especially the eyes). After my failure to win the office costume contest the previous year, I had determined to wear a less subtle one this time, and it paid off, literally — I won first place, which at my office meant an unusually high $100 prize. Here's the group photo of everyone that wore costumes:
But wait, there's more! The version of the costume in the photos above was worn on Friday, October 30th to work, but I wore the costume again on the 31st to the Halloween Masquerade Ball in L.A. Because of the problems I'd had with the cream makeup rubbing off, I tried something different for this event. I used airbrush paint — a non-toxic water-based kind made by Createx. I don't have an airbrush, so I used normal brushes to apply it, which worked well. I used a green color (I believe the Light Green) mixed with a smaller amount of Pearl Copper for a snake-like irridescent shine:
It definitely stayed on much better than the Mehron cream makeup had, to the point where I felt confident enough to apply it to my feet (which allowed a more traditional mythological look than the socks and T-shirt that accompanied the previous version of the costume). However, this paint as well was unable to keep from rubbing off of my hands, as you can especially see in the full-size version of the above shot (click it to see that). If I recall correctly, that photo was taken before leaving for the Ball, and the paint was already coming off my hands.
People at the Masquerade Ball seemed to like my costume, and I especially enjoyed encountering another Gorgon on the stairwell — her costume and snake hair had a very different approach from mine but were also very cool. If you like, you can check out a few additional shots of my costume, as well as a bunch of photos from the Halloween party at work that don't include me. Here are the additional photos.
Dan Harkless
Page created: September 22, 2006
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