For Halloween this year, my friend suggested doing a joint costume. After a few suggestions (many of which were Final Fantasy-related on my end) we ended up choosing Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask.

It could not have turned out better.

The eye makeup is primarily why I’m posting this, but I’ll go into costume details afterwards. I had originally thought to look for an anime eye tutorial, but none of them looked like they would work on my hooded eyes. After some searching I came across Cara’s (Vintage or Tacky) Sailor Moon inspired tutorial. I had watched her tutorial years ago, but had completely forgotten about it! I’m not even going to pretend that my copy of her look is bang on, as she’s quite clearly got far better skills than myself. But as soon as I saw that look I was like “oh hell yes, this is it”.

I didn’t have all the same products, so here’s what I used:

Primer: Urban Decay Primer Potion with NYX’s Jumbo eyeshadow pencil in Milk on top. Primer Potion everywhere, Milk only on the lid.

Eyeshadows:  I first applied tape to the outer corner of my eyes to get a sharp edge. Urban Decay’s Blackout was used to carve out the cut crease, with Sleek’s Ink and Bolt (Matte 1 and 2 palettes) blended into the top of the edge to fade it out towards the brow. Sleek’sPow! was used to highlight the brow.

Moving on to the lid – I patted Sleek’s Bamm! all over the lid and topped it with a bright yellow shade from the Sephora Smokey Eyes 2 palette.  MAC’s Blacktrack fluidline was used to line the upper lash line and carve out the crease as well as extend it a bit further past my inner corner. Sleek’s Pillow Talk was used to highlight the inner corner of the eye.

I then took MAC’s Deep Truth and used it as a liner on the lower lash line, with Feline Kohl Power pencil on the inner rim.

Lashes: I didn’t curl my lashes as I knew I would be wearing false lashes and I find it harder to apply them if my lashes are already curled. L’Oreal Voluminous Carbon Black in waterproof went on first and Ardell demis were then applied.

Face: Revlon’s Colorstay liquid foundation (combination/oily) in 220 Natural Beige all over with very light bronzing from Revlon’s Photoready Bronzer in Bronzed & Chic.

Cheeks: Physicians Formula Happy Booster bronzer in Natural

Lips: (All MAC) Prep + prime for lips (I cannot recommend this enough! Without it my lip colour bleeds out of my lip lines even if I’m wearing a liner.) with Brick lip liner applied to outline and fill in the lips. Russian Red lipstick over top of all that finished the look. To make sure this lasted all night, I applied the lipstick once, blotted with a tissue and then reapplied the lipstick with a lip brush.

Other: The full face shot above is before I did my hair and before I suddenly remembered I had to paint on my crown! The crown was done rather quickly with L’Oreal’s Infallible eyeshadow in Goldmine (applied damp with water)  with slight shading from Urban Decay’s Half Baked. I used Inglot’s 382 (matte red) to create the crystal in the middle and then outlined the entire thing with Physicians Formula Ultra Black liquid liner.

As for my costume… let me first say I’d never even watched an episode of Sailor Moon before, although I had been very aware of the character while growing up. I had to do a decent amount of research into her costume to figure out how to put this all together and I watched my first Sailor Moon movie while putting this all together. Watching the movie definitely helped me get a feel for the character. In general, I got pretty lucky as I had most of the materials on hand. With no sewing machine or skills to speak of, this entire outfit was hand sewn haphazardly. It was time consuming, but it was a LOT of fun to make.

The skirt came from a full length formal skirt I had worn to some high school event over 14 years ago that I just happened to find at the bottom of a crate somewhere in the apartment. I couldn’t believe my luck! Since the skirt was rather large around the bottom, I cut the whole bottom off and proceeded to pleat it so that I not only would have a short skirt, but a decently pleated one to boot! The skirt was a disaster to create. I ended up sewing on the zipper backwards (and it’s still on there backwards!), the pleats wouldn’t stay put, (I ended using my flatiron to flatten the pleats as my proper iron just wasn’t cutting it.) and I was really iffy on the length. With no full length mirror in the apartment, I resorted to standing on the bed trying to get a proper look at the length in the makeup mirror! In the end, I think the skirt could definitely have been shorter.

The top was created from a long sleeve white shirt I had. I chopped off the sleeves and cut the bottom into a “V” shape. I then sewed in padding to make the edges stand out a bit by using some sticky medical badges that I layered over top of each other multiple times. The sailor cape was created by using the top half of the big skirt and the white stripes were hastily painted on with white acrylic paint. I then sewed it to the shirt so that it would stay put.

I lucked in with Christmas coming early to stores and picked up red Christmas bows at the dollar store to use for the front and back of the dress. White gloves with a painted red trim were probably the most expensive piece I bought (~$15). The boots were also salvaged from my teen years – I used to call them my “Buffy” boots and they were black suede. I painted them twice with red fabric paint, a white stripe at the top and used a gold marker to mark in the moon shapes. The choker was an extra strip of red Christmas bow that I snipped off and drew a moon on.

In all honesty, I didn’t have time for the hair bobbles, so I did my hair as best I could to resemble the meatball hairstyle of Serena/Usagi.

All dressed and ready to go, we hit up Church Street (they shut down the block for a street party every Halloween) and were stopped by easily 100+ people for photos. Never in my life have I felt like such a celebrity! There were times we couldn’t even move two feet forward through the crowd as people kept asking to take photos with us. The photo at the top of this post was done for free by a professional company and I was pretty happy to have a well-lit shot that shows off our costumes.

Everything stayed put the entire evening – I was so happy! I was pleased with how well the costume turned out, as I was expecting it to look quite shoddy. The only costume failure happened at the end of the night when the rubber soles of my suede boots completely cracked and disintegrated, probably due to their age. In the end I was happy I had painted them and was able to use my Buffy boots one last time!

Having never dressed up in a recognizable costume for the street party before, I have to say I love doing it and am definitely looking forward to it next year!