Paint that stays
put on

BOBISUKA makes face and body paint. That is the whole of it. There is no skincare line hiding at the back, no foundation range, nothing that pretends to make anybody look like a better version of themselves. Every piece on this site exists so that a person can stop looking like themselves for one evening.

The range splits four ways, and the split is practical rather than decorative. Water-activated cakes are the ones that come on a wet sponge or brush and dry down matte. They cover fast, they layer, and they wash off with soap, and that is why they end up at children's parties and on face painters working a queue.

Cream paint comes out of a pot or a tube, stays flexible, and takes powder over the top to hold it. It blends into skin far better than a cake does, so it is what you want for a bruise or a wound that has to look like it grew there.

Oil paint sits heaviest and covers hardest, which is what a stage wants and what a bathroom sink does not. Sticks twist up like a crayon and go on dry.

Then there is the blood, and the blood is its own department. Spray for spatter, a thicker drip for a corner of a mouth, coagulated gel for something that is supposed to have stopped bleeding an hour ago, and capsules for the bit people always ask about. Scar wax, latex and a stipple sponge go with it. This is the corner of the bench that gets rebuilt every autumn.

We sort the whole range two ways because people arrive in two different states of mind. Some know exactly what they want and go straight to a department. Most do not.

They want a skeleton, or a zombie, or a face for a match on Saturday, and they have no idea whether that takes one pot or five. So every look here lists the pieces that build it, and the BOBISUKA collection is sorted by colour on top of that, because half the time the honest answer is “any red, as long as it is properly red”.

A few things the BOBISUKA range will not do, said here rather than buried. None of this is long-wear cosmetic makeup, and a painted face is not a twelve-hour proposition without touching it up. Metallics and pale pastels read weaker over darker skin and want a white base under them to sit up properly.

Anything oil-based needs an oil or a balm to come off, and soap alone will move it around rather than lift it. Keep all of it away from the eye waterline and off lips that will then eat. And if the skin has reacted to cosmetic pigment before, test a dab on a forearm the day before, which is cheap insurance for the night the face actually has to work.

Prices on this site are updated on a schedule and shown with the date of the last update. Everything else here, the 15 looks and the colour families and the pieces under each one, is sorted so that somebody standing in front of a mirror at seven in the evening can find the right pot in under a minute.