Off the prompt "cuddles."

Because I can't find significant portions of my stage make-up kit, I went to buy a basic Ben Nye kit from a costume shop today. I got them to whip out the board of foundation colors so I could do match test to my skin and what really struck me was:

All these dozens of variations of human skin tone, and Ben Nye is pretty good about having all kinds of races represented, and it's really a lot of shades of brown.

This is part visual arts training and part intentional self-deprogramming about race, but, whiteness is a social construction, nobody is actually #FFFFFF white, and when you look at skin colors as paint pots it becomes really obvious that pretty much all skin tones have more in common with raw umber (the color you mix into paint when you want the main hue to be less in-your-face) than anything else.

When I watch other students in my class think of those colors in Ben Nye pots as skin tones, it gets weirder for me: many of these (mostly white) girls thought they'd been given a a tone too dark for their skin, that the costume shop had run out of their color and they'd been poorly served. The girl next to me had a "tan rose" pot. I looked at it and looked at her and told her to put some on her hand and see how it blended. And it did. She was very startled at this development. Guess what, honey, you are not snow white. You wouldn't be no matter where you lived and you walk around in the sun in Valley of Hell so actually, you're pretty tan. A color called tan rose? I am shocked, shocked I say, that that matches you.

But even though white people know they are not actually literally white, they assume they are lighter than they are. And maybe even--subconsciously, I'm going to suggest, to give them the benefit of the doubt--want make-up a shade lighter than they think they are out of desire to meet our society's white beauty ideal.

Does anyone know anything about casting faces and creating prosthetic appliances? My experience: one undergraduate make-up class, in which we used liquid latex and kleenex to make scars.

My current goal: making custom Vulcan ears for niqaeli. Also pointy eyebrows for the both of us (but I am less concerned about that).

Most of my questions have to do with materials. Like, my textbook here says use alginate to do the cast of the face. echan claims we could do it with papier maché, though I am thinking I don't want to try to get newsprint strips fine enough to deal with the ear. So, alginate. (My book is all about the accu-cast brand; I admit I am looking at mold gel purely for local availability.) Do I want quick set (like, 3 minutes) or slow set (like, 8 or 9 minutes)? I mean, as a beginner at this, will I actually get the stuff on before it sets in three minutes? Or if I get the slow set will I end up going "Hold still, it's almost set... almost..." for like, five minutes?

So then, making the positive plaster cast off the alginate face ear mold (ps: I am thinking I will be casting just her ears since that is all I need to make appliances for. Is there any compelling reason to do a full face cast?). Materials for the plaster cast--is there any reason I need to be using hydro super stone pro stuff, vs plaster of paris I could pick up at Joann's?

Once I clay model the pointy ears and make a negative plaster cast of that, I am then a little waffly about what to make the actual appliances out of. Like, I'm reading about painting layers of liquid latex into the mold which would make an ear that conforms externally to what I sculpted but which would not be perfectly molded to the top of her ear. It would be... hollow, I guess? I get that you can't fill up the whole closed mold (inclusive of the positive cast of the ear) with liquid latex, that that won't set because liquid latex needs air to set? That if I want to do something that matches up perfectly to her ear, I'm looking at foaming materials--foam latex, poly-urethane foam, silicone foam, foam gelatin. Any recs re: my low experience level and affordability of materials? Or is a foam appliance overkill for this--should I just make the hollow latex appliance?

( current materials list for niq's approval )