Remember these easy vintage PAAS Halloween makeup kits from the ’80s?

A Halloween makeup kit in the mid-1980s was a small box with a few tubes of cream color and a sheet of step-by-step instructions, and for a lot of kids it replaced the plastic mask altogether. One of the best-known versions came from Paas, the Easter egg dye company, which started selling face paint for trick-or-treaters in 1984.

Painted faces were nothing new by then, but the supplies had mostly belonged to the theater. Stick greasepaint dates to the 1870s, when German opera singer Ludwig Leichner began selling it to fellow performers, and Max Factor reworked the formula for movie actors in 1914. Families who wanted a painted clown or hobo at home generally made do with lipstick and an eyebrow pencil from the bathroom drawer.

The store-bought alternative, from the 1950s on, was the boxed costume. Ben Cooper, Collegeville and Halco sold millions of them through dime stores and discount chains, each one a vinyl smock paired with a thin molded mask held on by an elastic string. A 1979 People profile of Ben Cooper put the whole line at $2 to $5. The masks were cheap and came in every licensed character a kid could ask for (Chewbacca, Spider-Man, Strawberry Shortcake), but they were also hot, hard to breathe in and built with eyeholes that didn’t always line up with the eyes.

That last problem became the opening for makeup. Safety advice aimed at parents through the 1970s and ’80s routinely suggested face paint in place of masks so that kids could see traffic, and manufacturers started packaging it for the mass market. Imagineering released a series called The Face in 1979, designed by Hollywood makeup artist Barry Koper, which paired greasepaint with a foam appliance and sold at toy stores.

Then came the Tylenol poisonings in the fall of 1982, which set off a wave of worry about tampered candy and made Halloween safety a national preoccupation for several years. Costume and makeup companies responded with a joint committee and a booklet titled “13 Great Ways to Celebrate Halloween,” meant to reassure parents that the holiday was still worth the trouble.

Paas walked into that moment with a product pitched squarely at nervous adults. The company had been in the egg dye business since the 1880s, when Newark, New Jersey, druggist William Townley began selling dye tablets, and by the 1980s it belonged to Schering-Plough, the same corporate parent that made Coppertone.

Its first Halloween line offered six kits. A 1985 ad promised makeup that “can’t block vision like some masks” and described the formula as hypoallergenic, nontoxic and dermatologist tested. Each box held three tubes of cream makeup, mixing trays and an applicator, and the vampire and werewolf sets threw in plastic fangs. By 1986 the kits had picked up stencils, stickers and a fourth color.

VIDEO  |  Vintage Halloween makeup kits: Paas TV commercial from 1984

Paas kits stayed on drugstore and grocery shelves into the early 1990s before the brand went back to being known for eggs alone. The boxed mask-and-smock costume faded over the same stretch, and Ben Cooper went bankrupt and was absorbed by Rubie’s in 1992. The makeup kit outlasted both. Cream and water-based face paint sets are now a fixed part of the Halloween aisle, and the FDA puts out guidance every October on checking their color additives, which is roughly the same reassurance Paas was selling 40 years ago.

Below, you’ll find a 1985 Paas magazine ad along with close-up looks at the vampire and clown kits, plus a TV commercial for the makeup that aired in 1984.