Episode Recap: Mutants Wear Makeup Too

Hello, beautiful artists! We’ve missed you all, and are looking forward to seeing your beautiful, or gruesome, or gruesomely beautiful makeups once again! Veterans Drew, Heather, Mel, and Niko begin vying for the prize by blending haute couture with outlandish aliens.

Heather doesn’t find any prosthetics that inspire her/go with her model’s gown, so she repurposes pasties as a brow piece and ear covers for a killer high fashion look. Mel, meanwhile, worries that she may be spending too much time fabricating horns for a makeup challenge, but it ties into her costume so well, she figures it’s worth the risk. Drew finds inspiration in the octopus-like undulations of his model’s gown, and paints a really subtle pattern of reds and blues on his model’s face. Niko keeps the coloration terrestrial, and this hurts him in the end: she’s not quite celestial enough to keep him in the game.

Fankids Drew and Mel are super excited about the second challenge, wherein they will make flesh the imaginary spawn of two very different X-Men. After rolling giant, 12-sided dice, Drew must imagine the child of Feral, a feline she-mutant, and Elixir, a hulky he-mutant. He decides that the cat-like patterning of the mama will go well with the gold and black coloration of the papa.

Mel struggles for a while with the offspring of Mystique and Colossus, since neither of them really have features that lend themselves to prosthetics. Finally she paints on some artex, a silicon compound, in honor of the metal plates of the paterfamilias, and layers on some fake pearls, which she paints Mystique blue.

Heather rolled two very humanoid mutants – Pixie and Gentle – and is at a loss for how to represent them in makeup. She finally takes the elfin ears of Mom and the tattoos of Dad and gives their daughter a pink Mohawk. Her work is lovely, but this is the end of the road for her.

That means it’s student against teacher! Did you know that Drew was Mel’s professor at the Tom Savini School of Special Effects? It’s true! In fact, he left halfway through the semester to be on Face Off!

Their final challenge is to create the monster from a campy, ‘50s, fictional horror B-movie, and paint it entirely in gray scale. Mel’s title is “It Came From the Swamp”, and she finds a very creepy alligator cowl as her centerpiece. She also falls in love with a blister-burn face piece, and though they don’t quite match in textures, she finds a way to make them work. From her tour on Face Off, she recalls a Ve Neill tip of using brown as a base for gray scale, and this gives her work a whole new dimension.

Drew leans into the camp for his monster with a massive, full-face piece – and then he adds horns! The prosthetics he chooses are so textured, they barely need anything extra in the paint department – the crevasses will pick up more paint, and the high points less, giving his creature instant dimension. It’s not quite as complex as Mel’s paintwork, however, and he must bow to the superiority that he created in his very own classroom. Mel is the winner!