Sexy Vampire Makeup Looks

How to get a sexy vampire look for Halloween

Get your vamp on girls. Bitten lips and blood red nails are hot for Halloween so your most obvious costume choice is a vampire. The vampiress (the female version of a vampire) is a darkly romantic creature of the night—a man-eating vixen with a taste for human flesh. She gets her beauty sleep alongside bats—usually hanging upside down so her hair is always voluminous—and embodies gothic glamour with pale skin, smudged eye makeup and blood-red lips. There’s a new way to approach the sexy vampire makeup without looking like Elvira. Follow these tips or try on sexy vampire makeup in our virtual makeup studio.

The modern-day vampire is more subtle, appearing to have been plucked from the pages of British Vogue, so you’ll apply foundation a few shades lighter than your natural complexion, blending it down the neck and chest. You want to look as though your skin has never seen the light of day. Skip the blush and bronzer (the fairer the skin, the better) and opt for a light powder to give your skin a slightly cakey effect that will make you look freshly revived from the dead.

When it comes to doing vampire eye makeup, take your cues from the fall runways with a fiercely smoky cat’s eye, using with liquid eyeliner in blackest black or intense purple. Just line the base of your lashes and build until you achieve the look you like and use a wet eyeliner brush to extend it down your cheeks as though it’s tear-streaked.

You can rim your eyes with a red shadow if you want to look sexy-scary—this brave color will make you stand out from the pack (let’s face it, there are bound to be other vampire costumes if you attend a Halloween costume soiree). Choose a deep red or berry lipstick with a matte finish and smudge it outside your natural lip line to create the illusion you’ve just feasted on someone's neck.

If you want to look completely uncontrived, forgo a wig for your natural hair no matter the color or the length. You can wear it in a messy updo, or down (think pin-straight, tousled or in tight curls as long as the effect is dramatic).