A 'DUPE'R MODEL
Sexy Ashley’s show disguise
Ashley Graham has gone from cover girl to undercover girl.
The renowned plus-size model is unrecognizable with red hair, a prosthetic nose, double chin and facial piercings in a disguise cooked up for Friday night’s episode of “Undercover Boss: Celebrity Edition.”
Graham’s transformation allowed her to go incognito in the cut-throat modeling world as an aspiring runway star named “Morgan” for the reality-TV show — and it was so successful that she was turned away from an open casting call.
The magicians behind Graham’s new look say transforming her internationally famous face into that of an unrecognizable stranger was no small task.
“Ashley is very beautiful, and the easy road to go down would be to make her less pretty, but you don’t always need to make someone ugly, frumpy or old to disguise them,” Shelby Michael Patton, the show’s head makeup artist, told The Post.
“We really want to make everyone look like realistic human beings you’d see walking down the street — nothing too overthe-top or over-caricatured.”
Patton and her team — who’ve previously created undercover alter egos for sports star Deion Sanders, singer Jewel and Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas — first had to slather the brunette bombshell’s face in three layers of silicone rubber for more than an hour to create a mold for her new mug.
Each day of filming, the artists spent 2¹/2 gluing a new nose, forehead, cheeks and other appendages onto Graham’s face, sticking everything down with medical-grade adhesive, then applying pigments and regular makeup to make it all look real.
“It goes together like a sandwich,” Patton said of the mask.
The prosthetics aren’t reusable, so a new set had to be reapplied every morning.
“Morgan’s” look was topped off with a custom red wig and bangs, made out of real human hair.
A makeup artist stayed nearby during filming just in case anything went askew.
“We use very strong glue, so the prosthetic nose is never going to just fall off like a vaudeville routine,” Patton said.
“Ashley filmed her episode in Miami during the rainy season and it was incredibly humid. Maintaining the makeup was incredibly challenging under those conditions.
“[The stars] often have to be away from us for several hours interacting with somebody and we hope the makeup is OK.
“If there’s an emergency — if the wig starts to look funny or the edges start to look weird — we’ll come up with some excuse to remove that person, take them to a private area and touch up their face.”