Face makeup is just what us girls needed for our annual Halloween tradition. My girlfriends and I don’t have any kids to take trick-or-treating, but we have always gotten together and dressed up for our special event. We dress up and then volunteer at our local city’s Halloween festivities for the kids. It is a good way to volunteer and it gives us a good excuse to get dressed up, which of course is the most fun part of it all. Every year we seem to get more elaborate with our costumes. Five years ago, I remember that most of my girlfriends and I just pulled out vintage clothing that we already had in our closets or went to the thrift shop and purchased something. Now we think about it long ahead of time. Many of us create the costumes ourselves. I know how to sew, so this is easy for me, but I usually have to help out my girls that don’t know how to sew and so we get started extra early. Funny thing is, our costumes have always been focused on apparel and homemade face masks. This year, the idea was brought up of face paint. Can’t believe we hadn’t thought of this before! This face makeup thing was going to be a fun new avenue to explore.

The idea of face paint to go along with our Halloween costumes sounded like an easy addition. When we got to thinking about it though, there were going to be a lot of technicalities involved. First of all, we thought it might be best if we got together ahead of time to practice. But what were we going to practice? Then, we decided that everyone who wanted to use face painting makeup should bring a picture or example of what they wanted it to look like. Then, we could all try our hand at it and see who could make it look the best. Believe me; we were not going to go to our city Halloween party looking like idiots. Or I should clarify, looking like more of an idiot than being adults who still dress up for Halloween. Oh yea, it’s for the kids remember? Anyway, it was decided that we would practice at my house the week before and we would gather after lunch on Halloween to get dressed before the event. It is going to be great this year because Halloween is actually on Saturday, so we could get together as early as we wanted. Well, if we are going all in for this face makeup you know what we had to do next...

Go shopping of course!!!! This is what we girls do best. We never do things halfway. If we decide to raise money for a charity, then we do a big event! If we donate blankets, it’s a car full. You get the idea. So, it’s amazing what you need for this venture. There are all kinds of things. One of my girlfriends was going to be Raggedy Ann, so she needed some white face paint. She also needed a face makeup brush because she didn’t want to ruin any of hers at home. Everybody decided that this was a good idea and they all bought a face makeup brush. They could also just throw them away after they used them at my house, for convenience sake. I am going as one of the seven dwarfs off of Snow White and one of my other girlfriends is going as Snow White. Well, she decided she needed face makeup foundation and face makeup powder before she could even get started. Of course, this provided me with the perfect opportunity to tease that if she wasn’t so many years older than the young Snow White, then she wouldn’t need all of that extra help. Well, she let me know that I didn’t need too much extra face makeup because I already looked like one of the dwarfs!!!! We had so much fun just buying the supplies.

Well, we got done shopping and we couldn’t wait until the week before Halloween to start practicing. It was all too exciting. We wanted to get started right away. So, we all went back to my house and started to play with the face makeup. Let’s just say that our first attempt was not a complete success. This stuff was harder to do than it looked. We decided to practice a few more times until we got it just right. Someone should have gone as Goldilocks huh? Man, I crack myself up. So a few more times, and it looked ok. Everything was ready. Then Jo had a great idea. We had bought so much face paint makeup at the store that we would never even use all of it and none of us wanted to store it for next year of course. We had not even opened some of it. Jo’s idea was to take it to the Halloween party and paint the kids faces. After all, with all the practicing that we had done, we should be old pros at it right? What a great idea! I couldn’t wait for Halloween to face makeup all the kids!