Alexia Maccon Cosplay Part 1: wig and goggles

As I mentioned in my Gaslight Gathering post, I made a replica of the floating dress Alexia Maccon wears on the front cover of the second Soulless manga.  I absolutely LOVE this outfit!  One of the first pieces I worked on was the goggles and dealing with the fact that my hair is most definitely not black!

For the hair I decided to purchase a black wig.  I went back and forth many times about the length the wig I should purchase and the style of the bangs.  The reason for this is that the hair length and the style seems to vary greatly in the manga, sometimes it appears to be only shoulder blade length and sometimes waist length!  Alexia's hair is almost always curly and often has shorter tendrils near her face and usually bangs. After much squinting at this cover, I decided I wanted a curly wig, with bangs and shaped sides near the face to allow me to have some curly tendrils near my face.  Problem number 2 is that I have a reasonably big head normally and waist length hair that makes for a really big head when I wear my hair in a bun to hide it under a wig!  Most cosplay wigs simply do not fit my big head with my real hair up under them.  After much wandering around on various cosplay sites for wig advice, I decided on the Hestia wig from Epic Cosplay.  Their wigs fit larger heads better and was actually pretty comfortable!  I was able to wear this wig all day and it did not slip or give me a massive headache. 

The goggles Alexia is wearing match her dress (of course) which meant I needed teal/turquoise googles which had metallic gold rims.  As this is not a color you can purchase goggles, I decided to paint them.  I purchased really cheap goggles on Amazon.  These things are listed as welding goggles on Amazon, although I think they are much better for cosplay than actual welding.  I liked them because they had the rubber edge for comfort and they screw apart to allow the addition of other lenses and make painting them much easier.  My husband and I purchased teal and gold spray paints from the local home improvement store to paint the goggles.  This paint specifies that it can be used on metal without priming, to allow a nice thin paint layer.  We disassembled the goggles and painting the screw part gold.  He covered the rubber and the leather nose piece with painter's tape and then painted the base teal.  And here are the finished goggles, I think this was probably the easiest piece of the whole costume!  Next time I will talk about the making of the hat.