Breaking the mould

A ‘little face-paint candy shop’ has morphed into a global business supplying lifelike body parts for hospitals and armies to train staff.

- BY SARAH STEWART

A middle-aged man staggers through the door of a shop in the Auckland suburb of Morningside, gulping for breath as he clutches his racing heart. “Bloody hell!” he gasps. “I wasn't expecting that!” Poor Dennis had come to makeup store BodyFX only to get his face painted. But in honour of Halloween, the entrance has been transformed into a haunted cottage, where a masked staff member leaps out at unsuspecting customers.

It's a bold business move to terrify your clientele before they've spent a cent. But it’s not the only surprise within these walls. Co-owner Julian Bartram leads Dennis through the retail store, past stands offering vials of fake blood, werewolf fangs, horns that can burst from your forehead. Bartram is wearing spooky contact lenses with fake pupils that make his eyes appear to be going in different directions, which will be no comfort to the still-recovering Dennis.

In the next room, Julian's wife and BodyFX CEO Yolanda - an internationally recognised body painter - is among a line of makeup artists transforming ordinary Aucklanders into a ghoul-ish cast straight out of your nightmares. Soon, Dennis's bald head has a siren-red gash carved through it, the Zombie prosthetics indistinguishable from his skin. The skeleton beside him tries to open her phone and her Face ID doesn't recognise her. Yolanda airbrushes snake-like scales over a woman's neck with incredible precision, and the woman gasps at her metamorphosis into Medusa.

The Bartrams would have been content with this life as purveyors of fright and fun and suppliers of special effects, cosmetics and kit to makeup and film industry professionals. But their business has taken an unexpected turn into a new frontier.