This was set up for rendering about a year ago, but I postponed it in the hopes that the hair jitter bug would be addressed while I tended to some other things.
Sadly, when I revisited, the bug was still present - in fact even moving Clump before Surface Deform as suggested in the bug report feedback doesn’t fix it… but I realised I could just disconnect the scalp hair and eyebrows from the body, since they don’t actually deform in this instance anyway.
I had to remake the eyelashes with hair particles though, and there’s still some twitching in the eyebrows and vellus, but obviously the makeup is supposed to be the main attraction here - and that posed some considerable challenges of its own.
Creating the basic effect was simple enough (tutorials abound), but to get the glitter to glint properly I needed the voronoi displacement to override the skin pores with facets (like glitter flakes), instead of being mixed with them, which diffuses the effect somewhat. Implementing this unearthed a baffling problem though, in which the displacements completely turn off when a few face wrinkle masks are active. So I tried reconfiguring large chunks of the skin, makeup and wrinkle nodes so that the displacement textures are mixed before being converted to vectors instead of afterwards.
While this appears to have mitigated the issue somewhat, it’s also introduced an equally perplexing one: the mesh turns black when there are more than four makeup node trees mixed together. I have no idea whether there’s some limitation on the number of nodes you can string together before things conk out, or I’m just using them wrongly. Maybe all this sounds familiar to somebody?
On another note, as of this render I’ve switched the SSS from Random Walk to the new Random Walk (Skin).