Hall Meeting: When Should I Buy Theatrical Contacts?

Ah, Halloween. That special time of year when your beloved vampire/werewolf/hybrid lover can look into your eyes with those romantic... super creepy... glowing red eyes of his.

Theatrical contacts, while not much more expensive than a long wig for even prescription lenses, are commonly seen as quite an investment that many people opt out of when putting together cosplay. Maybe it’s because you have to go through the trouble of having an updated prescription (even for plano lenses), maybe it’s nearly impossible to get them if you’ve chosen to do a last-minute cosplay, maybe because it’s one more thing added to the budget. So realistically, when should you buy contacts? Here are my conditions for buying contacts.

1) If you’re going to steadily cosplay that character. I have ‘Terran’ blue contacts for Kuja because I will be cosplaying that man for quite some time.
2) If you have a lot of characters with the same altered eye color planned. For some reason, I’ve been attracted to gold-eyed characters lately. Post Tokyo-Revelations Fai Fluorite, Grell Sutcliff, Albireo, and Emperor Fou-lu all have gold eye(s).
3) If having the right-colored eyes is the only way for the make-up/hair/skin tone scheme to work. For the aforementioned Kuja cosplay, those blue eyes locked in the pale skin and silver hair color combination.
4) If that eye color is significant to the plot. If that character has blue eyes just because that’s how the art is, then that’s not so bad. But if your character has blue eyes that glow like toxic waste because he was pumped full of Jenova’s DNA, then you should invest in contacts.

In general, if you can fit the contacts into your budget, there is no reason to not plan ahead of time and order them. For me, they make a huge difference in how in character I will be. At a convention, I’ll turn off being in character to do something like… walk into the women’s restroom, take a breather to check my phone, readjust my wig and reapply my man-lipstick. All I have to do is look in the mirror. Just having an eye color different from my own (not too many hazel brown-eyed characters in the world of anime) gets me back in character. It’s pretty handy.