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Hand Laid Bearded Lady

 

It’s been a busy couple of days with lots of exciting projects being completed and meeting lots of new people. One of highlight jobs was creating a bearded lady for Just Imagines’ performance at Crafty Vintage, Houghton Tower.

I have completed a lot of jobs of Just Imagine and they are an exciting events and performance company to work with, with lots of vision and characters to construct. Bearded lady is a character that I have created before, but this time was on a new performer, Emma who had an amazing voice!

So, let’s get into the construction of the bearded lady. It’s a simple technique (with practice) but can be very time consuming if creating a big bushy beard like what we needed for this character. The first thing that is needed is to prep the crepe hair, for this application and for the budget requirements we are doing a hand laid crepe hair beard which although can be itchy (always inform the performer that this will happen, but they will get used to it once its completely applied and styled) creates a good effect for the stage.

Because crepe hair comes plaited and tied, once it’s unravelled it has a natural kink to it which needs to be “relaxed” therefore once you cut the hair to length and remove the string you are going to need to soak it in hot water. Soaking it “relaxes” the crepe hair, you need to keep an eye on this as you do not want the crepe hair to straighten out 100% when making a beard. You want to crepe hair to have a little movement to it (or slight kink) as this will look more natural.  Once fully dried you can move on the applying, which is the time-consuming part of the application.

When applying the crepe hair to the performer you need to prepare the skin effectively using oily free cleansers and barrier creams. To apply the crepe hair to the skin I find that spirit gum/mastix works best for my needs and for this job I used Ben Nye’s Matte Spirit gum but the Kryolan TV Mastix also works amazingly well (I used this in a past bearded lady job) The key to applying a good realistic beard is to lay the hair in rows, working from the bottom of the chin out, then applying another row above and keep going until you have the shape you want applied. Its always a good idea to leave the moustache to the end as this can be the most uncomfortable part of the application for the performer.

When you have the beard laid fully, you can move on to styling and trimming to desired look for the character.

And there you have it, one bearded lady for a theatrical performance, it’s so much fun working with different companies and performers in this way. You learn so much and, in this industry, you can never know everything, so its importance to keep on practicing and learning.

XRx