Looking the part: How to age with make-up

Artistes are known for being willing to do almost anything to look younger than their years. But recently, an unusual number of actors have been ageing at a rather alarming rate.

We saw, for instance, 28-year-old Desmond Tan looking all ready to collect his CPF money, 35-year-old Jeanette Aw and 31-year-old Chris Tong passing off as knitting-club sisters, and 45-year-old Chen Hanwei with flyaway white hair in The Journey: Tumultuous Times.

In Vasantham’s ongoing epic historical drama, Annamalai, 30-year-old actor Karthikeyan Somasundaram is transformed into a 90-year-old, while 31-year-old James Kumar gets made up to look 70.

And at various points in The Journey: Our Homeland, for which preparations for filming have recently started, Rebecca Lim will act 60, Felicia Chin 58, James Seah 66, Jeffrey Xu 57, and Julie Tan, Ian Fang and Romeo Tan 59.

That’s a lot of faux senior citizens. But no one has acted as old as 54-year-old Hong Hui Fang, who plays a 100-year-old dowager in the new Chinese New Year-themed Channel 8 drama Good Luck.

All of this means to accommodate the spate of rapidly ageing actors, professional make-up artists at MediaCorp Studios have had their hands full pencilling in crow’s feet.

But how do they actually go about playing Father Time to the actors? What are the tools of their special-effects trade? And what does it feel like to sit down in the make-up artist’s chair looking 20-something and get up two hours later looking 80-something?

HOW I AGED 60 YEARS IN TWO HOURS

Well, the lovely people at MediaCorp’s Make-up Unit had enthusiastically agreed to make me old, too, which was how I found myself in the expert hands of Chau Kim Wa.

The principal make-up and hair stylist has been a special effects artist for 30 years. He has made Terence Cao fat, caused half of Chen Tian Wen’s face to sag and turned Xie Shaoguang into a vampire. But making people age is the most common task he performs.

Prior to our session, I was asked to send a selfie so he could plan my transformation. “How old do you want to be?” he asked, as I sat down in his chair. “As old as possible,” I replied. My answer seemed to please him.

Going straight to work, he first made my skin sallow and marked out the approximate position of my wrinkles with foundation. I was impressed. In 10 minutes, I had already aged 20 years.

Then came the hard part. Multiple layers of liquid latex from a little tub labelled Old Age Stipple were applied to my face and neck. It initially smelled like fish, but when it dried, it had this bubblegummy bouquet and gave me brittle, leathery skin. I had to keep my eyes shut so extra deep creases could be created on my eyelids. About three layers were needed and, between each layer, they blasted me with two hair dryers. It was highly unpleasant because it’s quite difficult to breathe with wind rushing into your face.

After the eyes, it was time to create wrinkles around my mouth. I was told to put my head back, purse my lips and puff out my cheeks so the latex could mould to the lines that formed naturally. “Do not laugh”, I repeated to myself, which, of course, made me want to laugh even more.

Again, this was done thrice. By the third time, it all started to feel a bit Kafkaesque. Plus, I was unglamorously inflating my cheeks in full view of the entire Make-up Unit, where tons of people come and go every day. “Ian Fang was here just now, but he didn’t recognise you,” my photographer remarked. I turned a bit pale under my Old Age Stipple.

After the latex layers had hardened on my face, which caused an uncomfortably tight sensation, Mr Chau lined my eyes, pencilled in a few more wrinkles and gently dotted my visage with age spots. “Do you have to remember the exact location of all the spots?” I asked. Yes, he replied, adding that they do it geometrically — by drawing the spots in rectangles, for example.

THANKS FOR THE EYEBROWS, HUI FANG

My hair was then braided into pigtails and twisted up onto my head, and a white hairpiece that looks like something the cat dragged in was fitted over it and sealed down at my temples with special glue. Bushy white brows were glued on above my eyes. It turned out I was wearing Chen Hanwei’s wig (which got a bit bedraggled when he filmed that drowning scene in Tumultuous Times) and Hong Hui Fang’s eyebrows. I was simultaneously awed and grossed out.

While the finishing touches were being added to my wrinkly mug, Hong, who has had to do what I was doing every day for two months, and spend the entire day with dried gunk on her face while shooting Good Luck, came in. “Hey, you’re getting the elderly look, too?’ she said. “It’s not so bad!” She swooshed off before I could thank her for her eyebrows.

When my transformation was complete, I looked into the mirror and my life flashed before my eyes. With my hoary coif, hooded eyes, tufty white brows and corpse-grey complexion, I suddenly felt listless and moribund, like I had one foot in the grave.

It wasn’t because I looked like a thousand-year-old geriatric, but a thousand-year-old geriatric who had never seen a lick of moisturiser in her life and had chosen to spend the past weekend rolling in hamster-cage shavings.

Needless to say, I had to pose for selfies. Mr Chau told me to first fasten the top button of my blouse. “Otherwise you look like a coquettish old lady,” he chided. I regretted not wearing my “I’m senile — and by the way, did I tell you I’m senile?” T-shirt, which would really have deserved an OOTD hashtag.

Of course, I couldn’t resist showing off my new look. “You look like you’re about to die,” said a colleague, sweetly. “Ooh, your neck looks really realistic. I would give you all my cardboard.” Another colleague, clearly traumatised, exclaimed: “I cannot take it. You look like sh*t.”

Thankfully, the artistes were much kinder. “Your skin still looks good,” said Felicia Chin, while Shane Pow quipped: “I’ll definitely give you two bucks if you ask me to buy your tissues.” Rebecca Lim said: “On the bright side, I’m sure you won’t look like this in the future!” Thanks, Bex — I’d like to think I’d be able to afford a facelift or two when I’m an octogenarian.

I was now eager to ride the bus home and see if people would offer me their seats, but Mr Chau didn’t think it was a good idea. “We have to remove the make-up for you. You wouldn’t be able to do it on your own.” True enough, it was a two-man operation. They applied industrial-strength make-up remover to my face and chipped away at the edges. The Old Age Stipple came off in one brittle layer, like a snake shedding its skin.

After all that, I looked into the mirror and I was suddenly young again. It truly felt like a Benjamin Button miracle and it was all I could do not to cry with relief. Because being old really takes a lot out of you. And one thing’s for sure: I’m going to wear a lot more sunblock from now on.

Catch Good Luck starting tonight at 9pm, weekdays on MediaCorp TV Channel 8.

Annamalai airs Mondays to Thursdays at 10pm on MediaCorp Vasantham.