Phyllida Swift posing together with her scar.

Alice Webb/Phyllida Swift

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Alice Webb/Phyllida Swift

Phyllida Swift posing together with her scar.

Alice Webb/Phyllida Swift

In latest years, folks have been asking themselves if their Halloween costumes are culturally appropriative. But activist Phyllida Swift says there’s one probably appropriative ingredient of Halloween costumes many individuals might not even take into consideration — their make-up.

After a automotive wreck left her with a scar throughout her face at age 22, Swift began noticing facial scars throughout villains in films and scary Halloween costumes.

On her first Halloween after the accident, a number of folks requested if her scars have been make-up. Kids informed her that her face was scary and so they did not prefer it.

“That was like a punch in the gut the first time that happened,” Swift informed NPR’s Morning Edition. “I didn’t know how to handle it.”

She runs a charity that helps folks with facial variations, and is among the many activists urging folks to suppose twice earlier than placing on Halloween make-up that appears like scars.

“For someone to don a scar for a night and say, ‘Isn’t this scary? I would never want to look like this.’ They can take that off at the end of the night,” Swift mentioned. “Someone with a facial difference is going to be living with that forever.”

She says that individuals who put on scars as costumes are “largely entirely innocent,” and she or he has had conversations with pals who “simply didn’t know until I brought it up.”

Swift needs to be a job mannequin for others as a result of she would not see quite a lot of constructive illustration of facial disfigurements within the media.

“I just starred in a short film where there was an animated character attached to my character, and the scar lights up,” she mentioned. “It looks a bit like a lightning bolt. It’s almost like my superpower.”

Swift would not normally put on make-up. But she’s impressed by others who embrace their scars and birthmarks — like adorning them with glitter.

“Everybody has, you know, mental, physical scars. And it just so happens that my past traumas are stamped across my face,” Swift mentioned. “I like to think of that as a superpower.”

Daniel James Cole, adjunct school at NYU’s graduate Costume Studies program, is a fan of gory Halloween costumes and their historic tie to the concept of demise.

“Traditionally, the idea of Halloween coming from the Christian and Celtic holidays, there’s an element of the dead coming out of their graves,” Cole mentioned. “So, if somebody goes to the trouble of dressing as a decomposing body, that’s in the spirit of what the holiday was intended to be.”

He says that whether or not a fancy dress takes issues too far is dependent upon the context, and that dressing up in costumes impressed by historic occasions needs to be a case-by-case choice. But dressing up in gore just isn’t the identical as ridiculing somebody with a disfigurement — which he says ought to by no means be performed.

“I think that if the costume is something like a zombie, or if you have a red line drawn around your neck and you say you’re Mary Queen of Scots, I don’t think that is any form of ridicule of somebody with a disfigurement,” Cole mentioned.

If your costume is meant to depict any individual with a disfigurement, Cole says it’s possible you’ll need to suppose once more.

This story was edited by Treye Green and Jacob Conrad.