Glam Meets Gore: Goldie Starling's Awesome Halloween Makeup Tutorials

Goldie Starling's sultry, DIY Spider Queen look for Halloween. (Photo: Goldie Starling/Facebook)
Goldie Starling's sultry, DIY Spider Queen look for Halloween. (Photo: Goldie Starling/Facebook)

A fierce pirate wench, with puckered scars running along the side of her face. An eerie doll, with pursed lips and hauntingly oversize eyes. A grim Jack The Ripper and his final victim, Mary Kelly, her throat slashed and oozing blood. Goldie Starling's Halloween make-up creations are a creepy combination of glam and gore -- and she shares her beauty secrets in her deeply detailed video tutorials.

"I happened upon YouTube beauty videos by accident," Starling, who lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told Styleist.com. "I was on Christmas break from college and I immediately became obsessed. I think I watched 20 videos in a row and then decided to film one for myself."

Starling, whose real first name is Angie, has no formal training as a makeup artist -- she has a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in graphic design and computer animation -- but her love of drawing and painting helped her hone her makeup skills. (You can see some of her other amazing looks on her Facebook fan page.)

"I would say painting has really helped the most. You prep a canvas with gesso the way you would prep a face with primer," she explained to Styleist.com. "You paint on your design the way you would apply your eye shadow and lipstick. You add shadows and depth where you would contour. Painting translates perfectly."

Her attention to detail is clear in every video she posts. A simple tutorial may take six or seven hours to make from start to finish, she says, but the theatrical Halloween how-to's take much longer.

"For these Halloween videos, it's been quite the labor of love," she says. "At least 20 hours, 30 hours per video just from conception to visualization, going and finding products and costumes, backgrounds, things like that." And that doesn't include the days of prep work before shooting.

"It's something I just like to do, though, so it doesn't bother me," she says. "I'm also a night owl, so all of my creative juices are flowing at night."

Some of her Halloween looks, like her sultry Spider Queen, can be created with products many women already have in their beauty bags. But others, like her version of deep-sea denizen Davy Jones, requires liquid latex and other specialized products. She made latex starfish using a candy mold and dipped cheerios in liquid latex to make barnacles, which she glued to her face using a medical-grade adhesive. A sea sponge dipped in watered-down face paint adds texture. For really complicated designs, she maps features out with a white eyeliner before filling in with face paint and white foundation, which she mixes with different pigments to get custom colors.

"I apply my foundation with a brush and a sponge," she says in that video. "I find that by doing it this way you're able to get into the cracks and crevices around the barnacles."

Her other secrets? Plenty of powder, to set the makeup and prevent smudging, and don't be afraid to use eyeshadow to give your lips depth and dimension. This creepy, intricate reverse sugar skull is a perfect example of when makeup meets art form: