The Grinch Who Stole Santa’s Color Palette

Berkeley atheist and blogger Brody S. (pictured) returned to San Francisco’s edition of SantaCon this past weekend to repeat a most endearing 2009 stunt. Among the sea of Jolly Old St. Nick’s, hers was the only Santa costume decked out in greyscale rather than the usual red and white, so as to create the real-life effect of a Photoshop manipulation.

LA Times blogger Tiffany Hsu shares the fascinating details of “Desaturated Santa”:

Brody bought a sewing pattern and made herself a Santa suit in a dark gray fabric. She took the cloth to a Kryolan SF, a cosmetics and beauty supply store, and color-matched some makeup for her skin.

Then came the gray wig and contacts. A photographer friend taught her how to paint her face. The entire get-up took months to assemble.

The above photo brings to mind everything from Woody Allen‘s Zelig to the once heated detabe over the colorization of black and white movie classics. As in what it must have looked like when a colorization technician interrupted his frame-by-frame retouching for a lunch break.

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