Why Paas Halloween Makeup Kits Became the 1980s Answer to Plastic Masks

Paas is usually linked with Easter eggs, but in the 1980s the brand made a memorable play for Halloween. Its makeup kits arrived when parents were being urged to think harder about safety, and when the old plastic mask costume was showing its limits.

A Halloween aisle shift that started with a practical problem

Face makeup for costumes was not a new idea in the 1980s. Stick greasepaint goes back to the 1870s, when German opera singer Ludwig Leichner began selling it to other performers. Max Factor later revised the formula for movie actors in 1914.

For most families, though, painted faces at home had usually meant improvising with whatever was already in the house, such as lipstick and an eyebrow pencil. The store bought Halloween option from the 1950s onward was more often the boxed costume, the kind sold by companies including Ben Cooper, Collegeville and Halco. Those sets, widely stocked in dime stores and discount chains, paired a vinyl smock with a thin molded mask held on by an elastic band.

They were cheap and plentiful. A 1979 People profile of Ben Cooper put that company’s costume line in the $2 to $5 range, and the masks came in a huge variety of licensed characters, from Chewbacca and Spider Man to Strawberry Shortcake. But the format had drawbacks that many people still remember. The masks could get hot, they were not easy to breathe in, and the eyeholes did not always line up well.

That visibility issue helped create an opening for face paint. Safety advice aimed at parents during the 1970s and 1980s often suggested makeup instead of masks so children could see traffic more clearly. By 1979, face paint was already moving into the toy aisle in a more commercial way. Imagineering introduced a line called The Face, designed by Hollywood makeup artist Barry Koper, that combined greasepaint with a foam appliance.

Why Paas fit the mood of the mid 1980s

Halloween safety became an even bigger subject in the fall of 1982, when the Tylenol poisonings triggered a broader fear about tampered candy. The holiday remained under that cloud for several years. Costume and makeup companies responded by forming a joint committee and issuing a booklet called "13 Great Ways to Celebrate Halloween," an effort to reassure parents that Halloween was still worth celebrating.

Paas entered that atmosphere with a product aimed directly at cautious adults. The company had been in the egg dye business since the 1880s, when Newark, New Jersey, druggist William Townley began selling dye tablets. By the 1980s, Paas belonged to Schering Plough, the same corporate parent that made Coppertone.

Its first Halloween range included six kits. A 1985 advertisement framed the makeup as an alternative to masks because it would not interfere with a child’s vision in the same way. The same promotion stressed that the formula was hypoallergenic, nontoxic and dermatologist tested, all phrases designed to answer the worries of parents as much as the excitement of children.

The kits also leaned into convenience. Each box came with three tubes of cream makeup, mixing trays and an applicator. The werewolf and vampire versions included plastic fangs. The advertising presented the sets as an easy way to create not only the character pictured on the package, but other faces as well, including clowns, witches, ghosts, soldiers, a wizard and even a space cadet.

What was inside the box, and how long the kits lasted

Paas did not keep the line frozen in place. By 1986, the kits had gained stencils, stickers and a fourth color, giving children and parents a few more ways to build a costume without relying on a full mask. It was a small change, but it shows how the company was trying to make makeup feel like a complete Halloween solution rather than a backup plan.

The kits stayed on drugstore and grocery shelves into the early 1990s. Then the brand returned to being known mainly for Easter. The shift says something larger about Halloween retail over the same period. The boxed mask and smock costume that had dominated for decades faded, too. Ben Cooper went bankrupt and was absorbed by Rubie’s in 1992.

In that sense, the Paas kits outlasted the costume format they were helping to replace. Cream and water based face paint sets are now a regular part of the Halloween aisle, and the Food and Drug Administration still publishes October advice about checking color additives in those products. That is very close to the same message Paas was selling about 40 years earlier.

What makes the kits memorable now is not just the packaging or the vampire fangs. They captured a brief moment when a brand tied to one childhood tradition tried to reshape another, using the language of safety, visibility and simplicity to do it. For anyone who remembers the era of thin plastic masks and vinyl smocks, that pitch makes a lot of sense.