Fake facial hair

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone had tips for creating believable fake facial hair, or knew anywhere that something suitable (and affordable) like that could be purchased? Try as I might I just haven’t been able to grow a good beard, and most shops I’ve looked at only seem to have fairly crappy mustaches.

It’s genuinely tricky and hard to get right.

It sometimes depends on whether you need it to be reusable, or one off…

The technical term BTW, is laying on hair. Have a search for “makeup lay on hair” or similar.

Here’s a video that gives a bit of an over view.

youtube.com/watch?v=netR7rr0XJs

It’s not complete but you can see the process.

There’s pretty much two ways of doing it.

  1. Glue bunches of hair to your face, one layer at a time.
    The above video pretty much shows that technique. This takes a long time and is fairly painstaking.

  2. Get/make a lace beard/moustache and glue it on.
    Much faster and more consistent, but pretty expensive to buy, or time consuming and fiddly to make. (You are literally tying strands of hair to a very fine lace. It’s very boring.)

For larp you can probably get away with a variation that I used.

For an Asterix game, where I was playing Asterix, I made myself a moustache before hand.

First I needed the right coloured hair. I have some of my sisters hair (don’t give me that look) that’s the right colour. So before the game, I painted a layer of two of latex onto a mold (I happen to have a mold of my own head. Don’t give me that look.) For small areas like a moustache, a flat surface would be ok, or you could find a curved surface of a similar curve to where you are laying it on. So I pressed hair into the wet latex, and tried to lay as much hair in as possible before the latex dried. Then I did it again, until I had a ratty looking moustache. Then I let the latex dry, and peeled it off while powdering with talc. Then I trimmed it nicely, and at the game I just glued the moustache on with prosaide or spirit gum. Presto. One moustache.

You could do something similar if you needed a full beard, but do it on yourself before the game. Use latex, and hair and spend an hour or two laying the hair on. Let it dry then peel it off your face. And you’ll have a perfectly shaped beard or moustache. If you are doing a full beard/moustache combo, I suggest doing it in a few pieces for comfort…

Oh, and you’ll need to get someone else to do the laying on of the hair. You really can’t do it to yourself. Or you could use someone with similarly shaped/sized face, and then glue that result to you.

For hair, yak hair is commonly used. If you can get it, human hair is good of course. In a pinch, a reasonable quality wig should also work if you are prepared to cut it up…