Skin-Tone Disguise

*Like magic*

Bioskin is a perk offered to victims of the Mechanika Virus, it makes cured patients look the same as they did before the disease. Bioskin helps civilians regain some sense of their former lives, but there is a catch to this bleeding-edge technology; it is implanted with not only GPS, but also countless mini-sensors all over it.

— ANNO: Mutationem

So you have a character who looks almost entirely human, but has an inhuman skin tone. It might be a clown who's not in a costume, rotting zombies, Human Aliens, or something similar. And for one reason or another, this character needs to blend in with a crowd of actual humans. So, what do they do? They disguise themselves with the color of a natural human skin tone.

The objective is generally going to be living beneath suspicion, whether because they just want to live their life normally without issue or maybe they're here to infiltrate human society and need to look the part. Losing access to their makeup can become a recurring conflict on its own; how will they blend in now?!

How the disguise works can vary. It could be as simple as slathering makeup on your body to evoke human skin. Some characters might be able to create an illusion of human skin via magic or tech.

So what if they have other inhuman traits to account for like odd-looking hair and eyes? Those can be accounted for as well such as dye and contacts. But the more obviously inhuman a character looks, makeup eventually just won't cut it. The trope only works if your character seems mostly human.

What doesn't count?

• Makeup for common blemishes like scars and freckles; it has to be to cover something inhuman.
• A human trying to resemble a human with a different skin tone; that defeats the purpose of the trope.

See also Not a Mask and Uncanny Valley Makeup. Compare and contrast Inhuman Eye Concealers. Subtrope of Hide Your Otherness.

Disclaimer: This is not referring to real-life skin tone changing like blackface or skin bleaching.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Zombie Land Saga: The main cast are a group of zombie idol singers; they're all made of rotting green flesh with loads of scars and stitches. Thankfully their producer Kotaro is a makeup expert and can make them all look fine, unassuming humans. Not having access to their makeup makes for a recurring plot conflict.

Comic Books

• Batman: Attempted unsuccessfully in Detective Comics #320. Bruce and Dick are exposed to alien radiation, which causes their skin to turn green while they're out in public. They try to conceal this with makeup, but the radiation effect repels it. They resort to wearing mummy bandages under their Batman and Robin outfits to prevent people from making the obvious connection.
• Marvel Universe:
  • From Civil War (2006) onwards, it is revealed that Atlantean sleeper agents have been planted amongst the world's regular populace, and because (barring rare mutations) the regular skin color of this populace is dark blue, they use a serum that changes it to normal colors, on top of allowing them to live outside of the ocean.
  • In X-Men comics from the late 1980s to 2010s, Warren Worthington III/Angel/Archangel has blue skin due to being mutated by Apocalypse. He uses an image inducer to look like the Caucasian man he is.
• Harley Quinn: As of the New 52 reboot, Harley has bleached white skin thanks to the Joker throwing her in a vat of chemicals. Issue #4 of her 2014 solo series has her applying makeup on most of her body to look like her old self, a process she finds very tedious, but necessary for her to continue working as a psychiatrist.

Fan Works

• Furry example: in the Star Fox fanfic Star Fox: Legacy, Cassandra dyes her fur grey to hide her natural blue colour, which marks her as a Cerinian.
• In All Wo-rk and No Play: An Abyssal's Trials in the Job Market, Trinitite hides her Abyssal Undeathly Pallor with makeup when trying to blend in among humans. Showering, changing clothes, and running low on makeup all cause difficulties for her at different times.

Film — Animation

• Inverted with Coco : Miguel is a Human. But in order to fit in the Land of the Dead, he painted himself as skeleton.
• Interstella 5555: The Crescendolls, a band of blue-skinned aliens kidnapped and brainwashed by humans, are covered in a substance that turns their skin and hair human colors.
• Penguins of Madagascar: Dave the octopus disguises himself as a human to blend in with society. Part of his disguise involves using his camouflage abilities, which come naturally to him as an octopus, to turn his purple skin to a Caucasian tone. Downplayed in that he has to do more than just that to disguise himself. He also has to stand up straight and wear a wig, clothes, and glasses with a fake nose.

Film — Live-Action

• Batman (1989): After Jack Napier/Joker's chemical bath turns his skin chalk white and gives him a clownlike face, he disguises himself by wearing makeup that resembles his original skin tone. However, it doesn't have the depth or shading of real skin, giving him a creepy mannequin look, and it doesn't conceal the facial scars that give him a permanent smile.
• Inverted in The Dark Knight. The Joker is an infamous criminal who doesn't hide his face when doing crimes but manages to blend into a parade by removing his signature makeup.
• Death Becomes Her has the walking dead heroines having to paint themselves. Since they lack the skill of their mutual ex who's a reconstructive mortician, this results in them both quickly winding up looking old and ugly with hideously wrinkled skin — which was what they were trying to avoid by becoming immortal.
• In I, Robot, Del Spooner has a Prosthetic Limb Reveal while in a fight with some robots. The next scene shows him covering up the damage again with some sort of artificial flesh-coloured spray.
• The setting of Pleasantville is Deliberately Monochrome, and one character is seen applying grey makeup to hide the fact that she is in full color.
• Warm Bodies has Julie and few of her friends help R (who is a zombie) get into the survivor camp without getting shot full of holes by covering up his grey, dead skin tone with makeup.
• In the intro of X2: X-Men United, the blue-skinned Nightcrawler wears beige/white makeup all over his hands and face (along with a hat and a trench coat) to be able to sneak into the White House unnoticed.

Literature

• The Haunted School: Thalia is frequently depicted as wearing copious amounts of makeup, lipstick, and concealers on her, to the point that it's impractical and the other students make fun of her for it. As it turns out, she was actually one of the Class of 1947, sent to the Grayworld and escaping from it after being stuck for 50 years — her makeup is used to hide the fact that she's Deliberately Monochrome due to the Grayworld draining all the real-world colors from her body.
• In the first book of Monster High, Frankie, who is green-skinned, is asked by her parents to wear theater makeup to cover it up before going to school for the very first time. Frankie, having never been in the real world before but being informed by fashion magazines that green is "in", refuses to do so, and ends up wondering why the first person who saw her totally freaked out. She wore the makeup after that.
• The short story "Some Children Wander by Mistake", by John Connolly features literal Monster Clowns who put makeup on in order to appear human.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
  • The Kree are a race of Human Aliens distinguished only by their blue skin. Vin-Tak, a Kree introduced in Season 2, uses special tech to make himself look like an ordinary human.
  • In Season 5, the human-looking Enoch paints himself blue to pass himself off as a Kree on one occasion.
• Farscape: In the season one finale, Crichton has been captured and is being held in a Peacekeeper base (who are a near-human species that Crichton can easily pass as). To help sneak in to save him, Chiana uses a lot of makeup to cover her Nebari appearance - whose skin tones are gray to light blue. It's not an entirely convincing disguise because she overtly looks like she's wearing a lot of makeup, but it's enough to fool guards at a distance who aren't paying attention.
• iZombie: Many of the zombies, like Blain, use spray tan and hair dying to cover up their inhumanly pale bodies, being able to pass as convincing humans. This becomes harder to do the more zombiehood takes over, resulting in their bodies rotting like a fully-dead corpse.
• In the third season of The League of Gentlemen, Papa Lazarou (a Humanoid Abomination who looks like a stereotypical blackface minstrel) uses makeup to look like a white man.
• The penultimate episode of Stargate Atlantis features a lone Wraith (a humanoid, but clearly not human, alien species) who gets stranded on Earth. We see a relatively detailed scene of his disguise process, including patches to cover his facial slits, contacts to hide his inhuman eye color and vertical slit pupils, false teeth (since his natural ones are far more pointed than a human's) and of course makeup to change that sickly pale gray-green Wraith skin into a more human tone. By the end he doesn't quite look normal, but can pass as some kind of goth metalhead well enough to cheat at poker games. It probably helps that he's in Las Vegas, and the baseline for "weird" is a bit higher.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "Trials and Tribble-ations", Dax paints over her Trill facial patterning to pass as human.
• Strigoi from The Strain (TV series) feature paler skin than the humans they used to be. Some of them apply makeup when they want to pass for human:
  • Thomas Eichhorst is the first we see who does this. He's also been a strigoi for so long, he also needs prosthetics to replace his missing body parts.
  • Eichhorst teaches Kelly Goodweather how to make herself look human after The Master returns her sentience. It's good enough to fool a few people.
  • Inverted with Gabriel Bolivar who, as a Marilyn Manson Expy, wears pale skin makeup when he performs on stage. After he's turned, he actually looks like he's still in makeup and doesn't bother trying to make himself look human.
  • The fourth season reveals that Eichhorst wasn't the first to do this. In Victorian times, Mr. Quinlan romanced a human woman who made him up to look human.

Tabletop Games

• In Vampire: The Masquerade the vampires (with the exception of the Nosferatu) look completely human except for their skin being as pale as the corpses they technically are. A basic vampiric ability common to all vampire clans is to expend blood to make them appear like living humans (also warming their otherwise room-temperature bodies as a bonus).

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: After the Mechanika Virus pandemic had subsided, a biological skin, appropriately called Bioskin, was developed for victims who survived to let them regain their original looks, also equipped with sensors to emulate sensations.
• Snatcher: The malicious Snatchers utilize advanced artificial skin to hide within society as they kill their victims. The skin, however, is very sensitive to UV rays, and develops melanoma quickly if exposed to much sunlight.

Web Videos

• Captain Disillusion has all of his body covered in silver paint, except for the upper half of his face. In one episode, however, he grabs at the dividing line on his face and tugs, revealing that he is entirely silver and the part of him that looks like it belongs to a Caucasian man is the actual disguise.

Western Animation

• Batman Beyond: When he needs to appear like his old normal self, Derek Powers hides his transparent glowing green flesh behind artificial skin. Unfortunately for him, the covering wears off quickly, especially when he becomes angry and starts emitting more energy.
• DC Super Hero Girls (2019): "#ItsComplicated" has the scarlet-skinned Sinestro disguise himself as a human teenager named Thaal Sinclair, covering up his odd skin color using flesh-colored makeup.
• Harley Quinn: When Harley and Ivy go undercover at Riddler University, they use makeup to cover-up Harley's distinctive bleached white and Ivy's green skin (as well as the fact that they are past college age). Barbara Gordon immediately recognizes Harley just from her makeup washing off.
• Invader Zim: Subverted with the titular character. While his gadgets COULD give him the perfect Full-Body Disguise to appear like a human, Zim is so inept he rejects that option in favour of a "disguise" that gives him human hair and eyes... but retains his green skin and lacks a nose or ears. Dib points this out as soon as they meet, yet their classmates buy Zim's excuse that it's a skin condition (including the lack of ears).
• Static Shock: Allie Langford, a late bloomer among metahumans, gained a literal body of steel for her mutation. She uses makeup to hide her silver skin until she gains enough control over her powers to deactivate them.
• The Simpsons: "Bart the Fink" has Krusty the Clown give up on clowning and faking his death. Bart and Lisa meet him as he's preparing to board a ship and see he doesn't have his usual stark-white face, round red nose, or pointy blue hair. They eventually convince Krusty to come back as he's sailing away, and when he swims back the water washes off facepaint, hair dye, and a prosthetic nose, revealing that his clown face is the real one. This idea was introduced in Season 4's "Homer's Triple Bypass", where Krusty reveals to Homer that his pale face is not makeup but rather a side effect of his struggles with heart disease.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "We'll Always Have Tom Paris", Tendi temporarily changes Mariner's skin color to green so she will blend in with the other Orion pirates. It's treated as a Blackface equivalent, the other Orions accuse her of wearing "false green" when it wears off at an inopportune moment.
• X-Men: The Animated Series: Zebediah Killgrave (known as The Purple Man in the wider franchise but never so called in the cartoon) covers up his purple skin with makeup so he can pose as a normal human philanthropist.
• X-Men: Evolution: Kurt Wagner / Nightcrawler hides his demon-like features (blue fur, tail, Pointy Ears, and three-fingered hand) with a personal holo projector that Professor Xavier gives him so he can attend high school.
• Young Justice (2010): In Season 1, Martian M'Gann M'orzz has shapeshifting abilities, but only had to change her green skin to a Caucasian coloring to blend in as a human citizen, going by Megan Morse. However, it's later revealed the appearance M'Gann takes around the team is just a preferred Shapeshifter Default Form modeled after a human character from an Earth TV show she loved as a child. Martian's natural forms are much more monstrous than that, and M'Gann's skin in that form is stark-white, not green.

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