Kiss Fancy Dress

Before

In a long year of many people turning 30, one of my loveliest Leicester friends celebrated her 30th this week and let us know it would be 80s fancy dress at her house party. We ruminated on this for some time. At first I looked into She-Ra as a possibility but we soon realised that we’d be better off doing a couple’s job. We toyed with Bill and Ted for a good while, but the outfits would have taken a lot of preparation to put all the component parts together, and we’re simply not that organised.

Then thanks to a conversation with another friend in the pub we hit upon the idea of going as Kiss. Simple, yet brilliant. Initially, we were going to go as all of Kiss, having half the makeup of each of the four members, and sewing different half outfits together, but we knew that taking a simpler approach would probably be more effective.

Our mantra this week has been ‘go hard or go home’, so we decided to go for it and dye our hair. It seems that you can’t get wash in wash out black hair dye these days – so we went for the sensible semi-permanent option. Just 24 short washes and we’ll be back to our normal hair colour lol.

A quick dye job later

Turns out that when you use black hair on my hair, it goes METAL black of DOOM immediately, but The Boys just goes a sort of darker brown. Typical. I’m going to be stuck with this colour for months and his didn’t even take!

The next day it was the day of the party, so we started constructing our outfits – using black clothes, finding studded leggings in the charity shop, adding tinfoil to our shoes and as vambraces, and using my old uni gown as a cape for The Boy.

We put on black nail varnish and I did us a little bit of a Kiss logo embellishment. Already we were looking like metallers. I brought some volume to my hair with the Bedhead Queen For a Day thickening spray and then set it at a height with Get2B blast freeze spray.

To get his Gene Simmons on, I sectioned off the top of the Boy’s hair and gave him a top knot with a section loose at the end. I used the freeze spray again to make the top knot stick out more and then to raise up the rest of his hair. 

Following this, it was time for our makeup. We bought some oil based face paints for 99p, but they were crap! You can see this in the bits of white we were able to muster. So I used an eyeliner for the black and silver eyeshadow for my CatMan nose.

There are loads of pictures of the Kiss boys online for you to copy your design. I shan’t bore you with the details, hopefully the results speak for themselves. A dash of red Barry M lipstick for me and we were ready to cycle to my friend’s house. Over dressed, surprising for motorists but ready to make an impact. Of course, we were wearing our hi-vis jackets – Kiss say stay safe! 

Ta da!