It was the school Monster Ball.

I was going to go out of costume, but then I suddenly realised that I had accumulated one over the previous weeks.

Let me introduce the Evil Mad Scientist.

_{^{(Yes, I know there's another EMS, but they aren't half as scary as I am.)}}

Talk about "be prepared" - always keep some sort of photographic device about your person, you never know when you'll need to document an Instructable!

Step 1: The Makings.

This costume has several distinct components:

The goggles, the eyeball badge (both of which I made recently), a lab coat (mine - I'm a science teacher), a rotting corpse hand (borrowed from a colleague), and facepaints.

Step 2: The Makeup

The face paints were applied by a colleague, but I was using my iPod as a mirror, which is how I got these shots.

The kit was left over from another school event, and came from a local supermarket.

First, a white base. I don't have much hair, so there was a lot of base needed covering.

Second, eye-shadows. A few dots of black around the eye-sockets, smudged in with the white, using fingertips.

Third, the blackened lips. The face-paint kit also contained black lipstick - apply to top and bottom lips, then do the mmmm thing to spread it out a bit.

Finally, the bloody head wound - we also found a tube of fake blood. After applying a smudge of red face-paint, my colleague simply drew on trails of gore. She reasoned that a true Evil Mad Scientist would not care about Health & Safety...

Step 3: The Ensemble

On with the lab coat, carefully on with the goggles, tuck the rotten hand into the top pocket, and then step silently out into the disco.

Despite being mainly bright white, it was surprising how easy it was to walk silently up behind a student, tap them on the shoulder (usually with the zombie hand), and then have them scream as they turned around...

Step 4: Afterwards...

After two hours of a hot disco, my colleague remembered that she had no make-up remover.

So, I drove home looking like this.

A word of warning - the fake blood took two showers to remove completely.