There is nothing like the curiosity that comes with youth—sitting on the floor, scissors in hand, cutting dolls’ hair and smearing makeup on their pristine, plastic faces. While the charcuterie board of items may have paralleled a sadistic crime scene, all young Kemper ever wanted to do was dabble in beauty and take up a brush.
As I grew, this interest in makeup became increasingly relevant, and it germinated in my fascination with the Harry Potter series. I desperately wanted to be one of the characters for Halloween, and thus begged my reluctant mother for the needed supplies. Following the stress born from not crafting the perfect Halloween costume for my fifth grade class, the first morsel of makeup she gifted to me was a cheap, kitschy 4-pan eyeshadow palette, adorned with an array of conflicting colors: dark brown, horrid metallic pink, beige, and chalky white.
Although I started out with just this one tiny palette, my room is now littered with boxes of makeup and my passion has grown into what is essentially a part-time job. I linger in theatre dressing rooms scattered around campus and spend my nights getting casts in makeup. Recently, my passion for makeup has developed into something familiar, even domestic, more akin to an act of friendship than the way in which I run around backstage in the hour before the house opens. A large part of my passion has begun to manifest in my friends asking me: “can you do my makeup?”
What started as a small favor has slowly evolved into a routine—before frats and formals alike, makeup has become not only my extracurricular career, but a quick and entertaining party trick. Want eyeliner? A grungy smokey eye? Blue eyeshadow and some face gems to push you out of your comfort zone? At this point, if you ask me “can you do my makeup?” I’ll probably say yes. Anything goes with the myriad of products that sit exposed in boxes upon boxes in my room.
With all of this in mind, Halloween has always been a big night for me. When else can you get away with doing the most elaborate and inventive makeup looks without people staring at you? My Hallo-weekends usually consist of painting silly designs on my friends’ faces and routinely cleaning my brushes to be used again the very next night. I once loved Halloween and reveled in my embarrassingly bad 5th grade Harry Potter costume, but I must admit: I am scared of Halloween makeup.
To clarify, I am not scared of doing your Halloween makeup. I am scared of doing my own makeup for Halloween, which I suppose is extremely ironic. The makeup I do on a daily basis is a sacred ritual—it is controlled, deliberate, familiar, and I could follow the steps with my eyes closed. I have been doing the same look since eighth grade and find it hard to deviate from my mastered formula: fake freckles, black eyeliner wings, soft blending, and pale pink-undertoned concealer that complements the natural light. I know my face as intimately as I do one of the actors I work with, and it can be hard to stray from the comfort of that same, trusty old look that I always lean towards. The precision and ritual of my everyday routine is comforting, and I think being behind the scenes for so long has made me complacent within an art that seeks to draw attention.
During the rest of the year, makeup feels tied to presentation: to being seen and received in a desired way. But on Halloween, in a Judith Butler-esque manner, it becomes a performance. To me, Halloween makeup on my face feels like chaos—gaudy, unhinged, sometimes funny and sometimes bloody, no worries of precision, focused primarily on expression. During Halloween, mess becomes method, excess and shock become art.
Thus, despite my fears, this year I have pledged myself to try to accept the strange liberation in the looseness and inherent silliness of Halloween makeup. There is a beauty in performance: letting yourself slip into a zone where perception matters less than personal enjoyment. Halloween makeup looks not to enhance or perfect, but to transform into something else if only for a night (or a weekend). It is a shift in mindset that feels almost radical in contrast to the way makeup is typically discussed: to polish, conceal, or “improve.” The same highlighter that usually gives a soft glow becomes a way to exaggerate, to shimmer like a siren or an alien, to blur the boundary between beauty and absurdity. I typically associate these kinds of extremes with the stage, where the lights are bright and the makeup is removed before stepping out into the normal realm, but I realize this is not necessarily the case.
I suppose Halloween makeup is a more honest kind of art—it doesn’t have to be “pretty,” and its temporality is not overlapping with that of the stage. The temporary nature of Halloween makeup lies within its short lived-performance, which doesn’t have to last more than a night, and honestly, doesn’t even have to last the whole night. It is fleeting and, in a college environment, a total mess by the end of the evening. I realize I have become so entangled within the fear of being perceived by an audience that views my actors (and by extension, myself) on a stage that I cannot even fathom sending myself out into a dark frat party of drunk Yale students with a fun makeup look… and this is what needs to change.
I am a makeup artist that is scared of Halloween makeup. But as I sit down in front of a mirror this upcoming Hallo-weekend with a palette of pressed pigments and an idea that frightens me just a little, I am looking to lean into the performance of it all, minus the audience lying-in-wait. Maybe, somewhere between the fake eyelashes and the smeared eyeliner, I will rediscover that kid sitting on the floor with makeup in hand, unafraid of perception and unafraid to make something entirely new.
