My favourite party game: Pin the Nose on the Witch.

In this episode, the MUAs play Fake Blood Chicken with the BBC’s watershed guidelines.

For the sake of sensitivity, the first half of this recap does contain images of Blood, Wounds and Final Destination Tangents. But it’s free of CATS (2019) screenshots.

Spilling The Casualty

For this week’s Industry Challenge the MUAs were off the tropical climes of southeast Wales

Give him a break, Connor has not thought about Geography since he dropped it in Year 10 and promptly replaced everything his geography teacher spent teaching him about V-shaped Valleys for the ability to recite every shade of NARS foundation in gradient order.

The trip to Wales was necessitated by the fact the MUAs were off to work on Casualty, a show I haven’t really watched in ages. I think the last episode I watched involved an incredibly convoluted scaffolding incident and having binge all 5 Final Destination movies over the weekend because, and it’s my therapist’s job to unpack this, they are my comfort movies; I have deduced that Casualty and Final Destination occur in the same universe. In this essay I will…

The inciting incident for the MUAs Casualty victims was a nightclub fight. This meant it was mostly bumps, bruises, scrapes and Ella somehow having to navigate an 8pm-friendly pint glass to the face. Or if you’re Jess, potentially an entire old age makeup

I know one should not throw stones in glass houses BUT the entire directory of BabyNames.com and your Gen Z nightclub goer is named like she’s the ghost of a maid that got pushed down a well and now haunts a country estate? And before you all say “OH BUT ETHEL CAIN” yeah, she knows

nothing but respect for my favourite Civil War Ghost Bride.

Jess did not have the best time with the challenge as instead of concentrating on and perfecting Rowdy Ethel’s face prosthetics, she got them on and then very swiftly moved on to kneecapping Ethel which was odd because Casualty is not famed for its close-ups of kneecaps

even by head makeup artist Kirstie Stanway’s own admission they tend to make like a last ditch university Halloween party costume and rub a bit of fake blood on actor’s knees and hope for the best

which is what became of Jess’s face makeup given that come 10 minutes until the end it didn’t look like The World’s Youngest Ethel had been in a nightclub fight as much as it did like she’d woken up with the most almighty stress zit

I’ve cried hysterically over less.
This did meant that Kirstie called in an assistant to help Jess with the finishing up of the makeup so they didn’t have to soft-focus Ethel the entire time. Jess didn’t take this great, not because she’s unprofessional as the show tried to paint her but because she’s on a reality TV show that she’s been fighting for her life in the trenches since episode 1 and she cannot catch a break

I am at this point rooting entirely for a left field Jess win. It won’t happen, but I refuse to let the Top 3 be as predictable as Connor, Ella and Shania have been since Day 1. (oh.)

Jess wasn’t the only one who needed a bit of additional guidance as Finley got a little lost in the process. Although props to Kirstie for not immediately pressing the Emergency Help Button when Finley went a bit Charles Vacanti and starting growing a nose on his actor’s forehead

it’s going to be hard to top that as my favourite sentence of the year. Even if Finley had give his actor an eyebrow nose, it wouldn’t be the worst broken nose prosthetic applied on television

Kelly’s flapping nose prosthetic lives rent free in my brain. It’s much worse in motion and becomes even more obvious given how few close-up shots of her they could do.

Finley did take the need for assistance in stride and gamely engaged with the other artist. Admittedly most of his additional assistance was to blur out the edges of his makeup and to stop him giving his model a face massage

and in the end Kirstie was very pleased with his makeup

you could argue that some of the face looks too clean but given that he gave his actor a sanguineous Niagara Falls for a nose, if he’d applied much more we would have entered late 2000s James Wong territory. Speaking of which, Ella had overstepped Casualty and very much gone into cynical (probably goth) girl side character in a Rube Goldberg Survival Horror movie

and you know she would have compeltely unnecessarily been teenage Ariadne’s ride or die character – it’s like Kat Jennings and Erin Ulmer had a doomed lovechild

*just imagine there’s screenshots of their Final Destination deaths here – I was going to have a picture but WordPress has hidden my ability to add content warnings to images and I’d feel bad showing a collage of two fictional women being lobotomised by building materials to anyone who doesn’t want to see it*

I cannot stress the amount of influence Keegan Connor Tracy’s performance in Final Destination 2 had on my life. That’s mother.

While Ella got carried away with quite how much of a BBC soap opera glassing her character got, Connor blasted his way through the prosthetics so he could get to the blown out glam eyeshadow look of his dreams

unfortunately it did kind of highlight the edges of his prosthetic pieces and I’m not sure the ash coloured bruising was helping the situation. But given that not even half an hour ago he had confused Ireland and Wales, he did really well. He’s lucky that the Six challenge didn’t come with a pop quiz on the English Reformation.

Lastly we have Shania who was the second half of Ella’s absolutely useless crime fighting duo

and once again she approached the challenge with one goal: To Do the Absolute Most (Literal Version)

“I’m going to do more work than the rest of these bozoes and THE JUDGES ARE GOING TO KNOW ABOUT IT!” Shania said she was bullied at school for having dark circles under her eyes, but I think it might have also been because she sounds like the kid who actively reminded a teacher there was homework. Neither of those are valid reasons to bully someone but one is slightly less of a not valid reason.
Going above and beyond and doing the extra bonus questions she had to download off of the school Moodle page as well as having a makeup that looked scarily real meant that Shania had easily scored one of the two opportunities to work on Casualty

I have to say, hearing them abbreviating Supporting Actor to SA for a group of bloodied and bruised women was… jarring.

A Casualty Makeup Ranking:
1. You Can Have An Extra Bruise As a Treat
2. It’s Finley’s Assistant With A Steel Chair!
3. Ella’s Overzealous Glassing
4. But She’s… BEAUTIFUL
5. Ethel’s Stress Spot

Transform and Roll Out

For this week’s Creative Brief the MUAs were having to become Masters of Disguise. Sadly none of them did anything that would allow me to easily reference infamous Dana Carvey disasterpiece The Master of Disguise

a film you probably accidentally watched half of as a child and vaguely remember laughing at but watching it as an adult only gives you an intense 3 day migraine. Although, Leomie’s attempt at a Dom impression (no, not like that) had a certain annoying-YouTube-improv-troupe feel to it

I don’t watch Smosh, I just watch compilations of Smosh’s funniest moments. And by that I do mostly mean the clip of Amanda Lehan-Canto learning about Harambe 8 years after it happened

I have never had a more immediate crush on someone than when she said her only source of news is People.com’s email newsletters.

It’s been a while since anyone ran to the Lewis Carroll well for makeup inspo and much like buses, as soon as they do, two happen to come at once. The first was from Shania who was doing the White Rabbit and DESPERATELY trying to say “spirit animal” without saying “spirit animal”

eventually elaborating that her personal White Rabbit is her girlfriend

the only snag she hit with her makeup was trying to make sure it looked like the White Rabbit and not a poorly fated lab rat

the ultimate decision maker being Ella who has never met a Claire’s Accessory animal headband she could say no to

and while ordinarily I would scream “SABOTAGE!”, Ella was definitely not steering Shania wrong. Rabbits have 3 iconic features: long ears, buck teeth and Myxomatosis. And falling short of giving her model a set of Bugs Bunny’s dentures, the ears were the only thing really selling it completely as a rabbit

my new Roman Empire is the fact her model didn’t close her eyes during the picture taking????? YOU HAD ONE JOB BABE! Now you just look like a rabbit that had their makeup done by Jess! But the judges could at least fawn over the fur texture she’d achieved

which also conveniently served as bonus cover up for her prosthetics edges.

The second of our residents of Wonderland was Jess, who having started in the red chair had to scale back her use of prosthetics. Initially it looked like she had planned to use a bald cap and more of the little horns

but having lost 15 minutes, she’d scrapped the cap and was using just two little horned prosthetics on the forehead

and as time rapidly drew to a close Jess took one look around the room and realised that if you weren’t cutting off at least 80% of your models’ respiratory functions, you weren’t doing Glow Up

Spoiler Alert: much like on MasterChef when someone makes an unrequested soup, it was not enough

as ever, Jess’s cosplay skills were top tier: excellently applied prosthetics and I don’t think anyone could beat her in applying a base skin tone worthy of the most whimsical members of the Faye Wild. However it’s hard to ignore the lack of transformative prowess when Ella has imagined “What if a parrot, but an apex predator?”

is this a great makeup and ambitiously applied prosthetic? Yes, absolutely. Is it also kind of hilarious to see a parrot that looks like Flat Newman from Space Jam? Also, undeniably yes

but as funny as any bird is from a full face-on point of view, nothing ever quite gets me like someone on Glow Up retrospectively applying emotional weight to their makeup

serial killers also talk, Ella.

While Ella painted with all the colours of the rainbow to make her Aarakocra drag queen, Finley was working with a simple black and white palette for his Frankenstein’s monster

the creation of which I was mildly worried about when I saw his moodboard sketch that looked like an E-FIT of Harry Melling

however, I think he mostly got there in the end. Or at least he had learnt from his previous Frankensteining attempt and got the nose in the right place first time around

as the judges pointed out, it wasn’t quite exaggerated enough – the black shadows needed to be a deeper and he probably could’ve used a bulkier forehead prosthetic.

Lastly we have Connor who found himself in the red chair alongside Jess, but unlike Jess he still went to town on the prosthetics for his Royalty Free Green Witch Character™

this is pretty damn fantastic – a couple of times Connor has been told he’s playing it a little safe and minimal with how hard he’s pushing himself. This however feels like a full-scale theatrical piece. The one thing I wish he’d done more with is the hair, even if I do kind of love the fact the fiery mullet says she’s about to drop a banger of an alt metal album with her band Witches Get Stitches.

A Transformative Makeup Ranking:
1. Connor’s Witches Get Stitches Frontwoman
2. Shania’s Silly Rabbit
3. Ella’s Apex Parrot
4. Finley’s Corpse Revivor
5. Back To The Cater-pillory Box With You

Skinny Legends

For this week’s Face Off Challenge, Jess and Finley were having to recreate a 90s-style skinny brow, a look I’m not sure has ever worked outside of the intensely goth girls that haunt second hand bookshops and Rihanna on the cover of Vogue

the name of the game was obviously evenness and symmetry, a task I’m not sure was fair to expect of Finley and Jess given that even Dom’s example pair looked a bit like Dick Dastardly’s moustache asking a question

couldn’t have given him a second shot, huh?

The outcome was almost immediately decided when Finley brought possibly the most wretched brow you’ve ever seen kicking and screaming into this world

and with the almost full 10 minutes left, everyone just had to sit there and watch a pair of eyebrows kick this poor puppy

Finley did manage to pull it back better than I thought he could but it was an undeniable sweep for Jess who had proper skinny brows whereas Finley had had to fill his out so much they were basically just a pair of surprised eyebrows

and so unsurprisingly we were saying goodbye to My Fav

he went out exactly as I thought he would: mostly just being there for the vibes.

And so, we head to the semi-final where I am sure nobody could guess what would happen…