Woman Spends 500 Hours Creating Halloween Makeup Looks (Exclusive)

Though you may not guess it from her TikTok account, Iris Grace Dowling always had the same Halloween costume as a kid — a witch.

“I liked the hat,” she laughs. “So I just wore the hat.”

This year, Dowling’s Halloween plans look a little different: The 22-year-old content creator has taken on the daunting challenge of creating 31 makeup looks for the month of October, which she has shared to over 2.6 million followers on TikTok. And these are not your typical amateur costumes. Since Oct. 1, Dowling’s page has regularly featured extreme transformations, complete with full-face silicone prosthetics, psychedelic neon face paint and professional video editing.

During a day in October, the creator briefly put down the makeup brushes to chat with PEOPLE, breaking down the months of work that go into her slate of Halloween content, from the hours-long application process, to the intense scrubbing with dish soap required to remove the makeup, to the time she spends in post-production before hitting upload.

Her love affair with makeup began at a young age, growing up in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“My mom was big into makeup, so I would always raid her makeup collection,” she says. 

She started wearing makeup to school in sixth grade, even when she wasn’t allowed. But she also adored makeup as an art form and was a lover of the beauty YouTubers of the 2010s, known for their creative challenges.

When she was 16, she was playing around with makeup late into the night and painted a version of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Rococo-era painting The Swing on her face. She shared the look on Instagram, and the post blew up.

“People really liked it and I just kept doing it,” Dowling says.

At the time, she had a modest camera setup, filming videos under her bunk bed with a single, unreliable ring light. But over the next few years, as she turned her childhood passion into a legitimate career — and she amassed millions of followers along the way — Dowling bought better equipment, investing in a professional camera and dozens of studio-grade lights to perfect the quality of her videos.

“I didn’t really know that there was money in social media, so it really started off as just something I loved doing,” she says. “And then, over time, I started making money from it, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is something I could do full time.’ I think that’s when I really started upgrading my equipment and treating it almost as a TV show.”

Dowling shares her extreme transformations throughout the year, turning into a bloody Christmas gremlin or giving her creative take on a clown, for instance, but Halloween is when she truly shines.

“I’ve always loved Halloween,” she says — and it’s not hard to believe, as this is her third year attempting to create 31 original makeup looks to celebrate the spooky season.

To pull off the feat, Dowling tells PEOPLE, she starts planning months before the holiday, especially because she pushes herself to go beyond merely recreating a popular character and instead puts her own artistic spin on each look. 

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For all 31, she creates a full face sketch on her iPad, including a mood board for the vibes she wants to emulate. Then it’s time to craft prosthetics, which can take upwards of several days. And that doesn’t even include the three to five hours it usually takes to actually apply the makeup to her face, as well as the bottles of makeup remover, dish soap, and occasionally rubbing alcohol she uses to scrub the makeup off.

“You know, it’s a lot,” she admits, estimating that she’ll spend roughly 500 hours ahead of Halloween on her content for the month. “It’s so fun, though. It’s so rewarding — especially making my own prosthetics, because I create my own characters from scratch and really make it my own thing.”

Once all of her content is filmed for a given look, Dowling starts the video editing process, which she says surprisingly makes up the bulk of her work as a content creator.

On any given day, Dowling says, “I wake up, I edit, I do a makeup look, I edit some more, and then I edit some more, and then I edit some more. The editing alone is probably 90% of it.”

“I love every process,” continues the creator. “It’s so many little jobs in one. I’m a videographer, I’m a photographer, I’m a makeup artist. Each one of them is its own little process and it’s all really fun.”

For as much as she enjoys the process, when asked if there are any looks that she would absolutely never repeat, one immediately comes to mind: when she covered her entire upper body in faux grass.

“It was like having so much facial hair but all over my face and it wouldn’t come off,” she laughs. “I was sitting there scrubbing grass off my skin for like two hours and I still find grass specks everywhere.”

And by the time the actual Halloween holiday rolls around at the end of October, says Dowling, she’s pretty exhausted — so much so that she doesn’t even think she’ll be able to muster getting into costume to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters at her house. And many of her makeup looks are not really designed to be worn out to a party, as the prosthetics can get pretty hot and sometimes even impair her visibility.

“When I just turn myself into like 50 different things, I feel like I have to do something,” she says. “But by the end of the month, I’m like, ‘I just wanna sleep.’ ”

So she might just head to Spirit Halloween, buy a pointy black hat, and dress as a witch again.