What’s the most surprising thing about “Face Off,” the Syfy channel’s special-effects makeup addition to the world of cutthroat reality competition shows? It’s not cutthroat at all.
“We all genuinely like each other,” Stella Sensel, a Bushwick resident who nearly made it to the end of the show, which wrapped up its seventh season on Oct. 28, tells The Post. “We’re actually creating art. We don’t have time for that.”
That’s not to say being on the show, which challenges artists to create prosthetic makeup jobs — usually tinged with horror, fantasy or the grotesque — in a matter of hours, wasn’t without its grueling circumstances.
Sensel reveals that she was cut off entirely from the outside world when the cameras weren’t running: no TV, phones, computers or sketch pads. They couldn’t even leave the house they stayed in unless accompanied by a crew member.
“We had to rely on each other for entertainment,” she says. “We made up a lot of games, played children’s games like hide and seek, used Monopoly money to play poker,” she says.
And instead of sniping backstage, sabotage or shady alliances, competitors collaborated with each other, lending an arm to make a mold or giving pointers on sculpting techniques.
The world of the horror and sci-fi makeup industry is small — relative to, say, restaurants or fashion — so Sensel, 35, says being the bad guy of a reality show would be a bad career move.
“We don’t want people to see us on the show acting like jerks, because people are not going to want to work with each other,” she notes. “We’re going to hire each other.”
She’s still in touch with the other cast members through a private group on Facebook, and they even held a mini-reunion at Monsterpalooza, a conference for effects artists held in September.
Looking back, Sensel says she’s surprised at what she was able to create in just a few hours on the show.
One of her favorite creations came from mashing up “The Wizard of Oz” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
She and another contestant collaborated on a flying monkey dressed as the Queen of Hearts’ court jester, with points of a jester hat growing out of its monkey-ish head and playing cards covering the inside of its wings like scales.
While specific shots were sometimes re-created for the camera, the deadlines and time crunch were all real.
“People spend months on this stuff,” she says. “I surprised myself every single time. I was like, ‘Whoa, I did all that?’”