Skeleton Makeup Tutorial for Halloween

Milk Makeup is celebrating Spooky Season and our best-selling range of Hydro Grip/Hydro Ungrip products with Hydroween. For the occasion, we’re bringing Halloween Makeup inspiration, created with your favorite Milk products—courtesy of some talented members of our Milk Fam.

Jakobe (@jakobejay), a Los Angeles-based creator and makeup artist, dreamed up a skull-inspired makeup look that will give everyone at your next Halloween party a chill down their spine.

Witches, ghosts, mummies—some Halloween costumes are staples every year, and that includes skeletons. Take a trip to any Spirit Halloween store, or wherever you usually get your Halloween costume ideas, and you’ll probably find several versions of the classic. It's one you can also easily repurpose as a Day of the Dead look (for those who observe) by just adding a few extra colors on a layer of white face paint.

But just because it's a popular choice, doesn’t mean it has to be basic. Case in point: this Halloween skull makeup tutorial done by Jakobe, a member of our LA Milk Fam, showing just how glam it can be. Jakobe’s DIY skeleton makeup looks like a complex work of art that only someone incredibly talented could pull off. However, this is not professional makeup, and if you know how to contour your face, you can recreate it—trust!

Luckily, Jakobe showed us exactly how he turned his skin into bones in this easy, last minute, skull makeup tutorial. And of course, he reached for several of Milk Makeup’s Hydro Grip makeup products to lock in all the drop-dead gorgeousness on his face (you can check out the tiktok video here).

Let’s get to the bare bones of how to recreate it, shall we? Read on for a step-by-step breakdown of this Halloween makeup tutorial.

1. Prep + Prime

First, Jakobe creates a blank canvas for the skull look with a brow cover, aka gluing down his brows. Skeletons don’t have ‘em anyway. He coats the hairs with a glue stick and brushes through them with a clean spoolie in an upward direction to smooth them. Let them dry as you move on to the next steps—you’ll be covering them with concealer later.

Once the brows are glued, slather on some moisturizer to ensure you have a hydrated base for this Halloween makeup look. Then, apply a pump or two of our Hydro Grip Primer. It gives your makeup something to “grab” on to, helping it last for up to 12 hours.

Content creator Jakobe Jay Applies Milk Makeup Hydro Grip Primer and glues down brows

2. Sketch

Our Infinity Long Wear Eyeliner in Outer Space is what you'll use to sketch out your skeleton face. Jakobe starts by outlining his eye sockets and nose. Think of an exaggerated smoky eye when drafting your shape with the eyeliner pencil (liquid eyeliner works too if that's your comfort eyeliner). He then works it on his jawbone, adding lines below his cheekbones and along his jawline—similar to how you would when contouring. He also draws ridges onto his forehead like an actual skull.

Don’t worry about making your lines super sharp and precise. You can correct and carve them out with a little of our Hydro Ungrip Makeup Remover + Cleansing Water on a cotton swab, just as Jakobe does.

Content creator Jakobe Jay draws on skeleton makeup using Milk Makeup Infinity Long Wear Eyeliner

3. Fill + Finesse

Once that base is down, to mimic the negative space of a skull, fill in the hollows of your cheeks, the tip of your nose, eye sockets, and temples with black face paint on a flat brush. If you don’t have face paint (SFX or regular, your call) on hand, black eyeshadow works as well. For a skeleton makeup tutorial, black and white shades are going to be your friends on this look.

Add the teeth—grab your black eyeliner again and draw two rows of teeth onto your lips, making sure they get gradually smaller as you get toward the outer corners of your mouth.

Content creator Jakobe Jay does skeleton makeup face paint

4. Conceal + Finish

Time to really make your brows fade into the background. Swipe Future Fluid Creamy Hydrating Concealer on top of your glued-down brows (they should be dry by this step) and blend it out with a dense fluffy makeup brush. It leaves behind a natural finish that looks like skin—perfect, since you want it to look as if there’s nothing there.

Finally, you’ll want to blend out the liner upward and inward to create depth and shadows, especially on your chin, forehead, and brow bone to complete your skull face. Don’t be afraid to freestyle a bit and play with your creativity as you finesse those hollows. Once you’re done, seal everything in with a couple spritzes of our Hydro Grip Set + Refresh setting spray to lock in your makeup for up to 12 hours. In terms of halloween makeup ideas, this one gets points for simplicity.