I was standing in the Halloween aisle at Rite Aid holding a $2.49 tube of vampire-white face paint when I flipped it over and read the words “may contain trace heavy metals” printed on the back like it was a serving suggestion. Cleo, who had been quietly chewing the corner of a glow bracelet, looked up at me with her big trusting eyes and asked if she could be the kind of vampire that has a cape. I put the tube back. I picked it up. I put it back. A teenager restocking the shelf told me they all say that.
I want to be clear that I am not one of those moms. I let my kids have fun. Wyatt has worn a plastic Spider-Man mask for two consecutive Halloweens and I have made peace with that, because the mask is from before they started adding the soft-touch coating that smells like a yoga mat warehouse. But “trace heavy metals” is not a phrase I am prepared to smear onto a five-year-old’s cheekbones for the sake of a Marlene-approved porch photo.
Marlene, of course, said it was fine. Marlene said heavy metals are just minerals, and minerals are just earth, and earth is what we all came from, and “didn’t you tell me last spring you were eating sea moss off a spoon?” I tried to explain that sea moss is a plant and lead is an element on the periodic table that makes you forget your own zip code, and Marlene said her grandfather painted houses for forty years and lived to be ninety-one, which is the kind of evidence I cannot argue with because it makes no sense in any direction.
I posted in Clean Costume Co-Op (No Petro, No Phthalates, No Excuses) and within nine minutes had forty-seven replies, three voice memos, and one woman in Spokane who linked me to a 2014 cosmetic safety report so dense I had to ask Tessa what an oxide was. The consensus was that the cheap face paints are a soup of titanium dioxide, mineral oil, and what one mom in the group described, in all caps, as “WHATEVER THEY SCRAPED OFF THE FACTORY FLOOR IN GUANGZHOU.” That is not me saying that. That is Janelle in Spokane.
I called Renee, my husband’s sister, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Greenville and is basically a nurse at this point because she has been there nine years and has seen every kind of rash a child can produce. Renee said face paint is one of the top three things they get calls about every November. The other two are glow stick fluid in the eye and “unspecified candy reactions,” which I think we all know means red dye 40. Renee said if I was going to use it anyway, to do a patch test on the inside of Cleo’s wrist for forty-eight hours. I do not have forty-eight hours. Halloween is a week away.
So I made my own. I rendered down a half cup of grass-fed tallow my friend Adrienne traded me for two jars of fire cider, and I whipped it with a teaspoon of activated charcoal for the eye sockets and a tablespoon of beet powder for the bloody mouth effect. I added a pinch of pink Himalayan salt because Adrienne swears it stabilizes pigment, and even if it doesn’t, salt is a mineral, not an ingredient, and minerals are just earth, which is apparently the through-line of my entire month.
Cleo cried. She said she looked like a beet, which, fair. The beet powder, it turns out, does not stay where you put it. It migrated into her hairline and down her neck and onto the kitchen island and onto our white goldendoodle, Biscuit, who is now a faintly pink goldendoodle and may be one until Christmas. Tessa walked in, took one look, and said “Mom. Mom. The other moms use the tube,” in the voice she has started using lately that I do not love.
I caved on the white base. I bought a different brand at the natural grocery for $14.99 that lists nine ingredients, none of which require the word “trace,” and I am telling myself it was always the plan. The vampire cape is from Marlene’s attic and almost certainly off-gasses something, but I’m picking my battles, and tonight my battle is the witch hat from Dollar Tree that has been quarantined on the back porch for six days and still smells, faintly, like a brand-new car.