Tips and Tricks for Collecting Vintage Halloween Masks

Vintage Halloween masks are highly collectible and hard to find. If you are lucky enough to score some, you need to make sure they are front and center in your holiday decor. Not only are they sometimes elusive, they can also be a bit tricky to display creatively. No problem, we’ve got tips and tricks on everything from where to find them, how to display them and what to do with them the rest of the year.

The obvious places to look for Halloween masks are antique shops and flea markets, but the right time of year can be key. Antique dealers tend to rotate their stock, so if they have vintage costumes for sale, they may not add them to their booth until the fall. If you are lucky enough to find one in the off-season, you might be able to negotiate a better price. Online auctions are also a great alternative, and in recent years, Instagram has become a hot spot for vintage mask resellers. Search for obvious terms like “vintage Halloween masks,” but also use the brand names Ben Cooper and Collegeville for even more results.

Finding vintage Halloween masks can be tricky for several reasons. For starters, in the past, companies did not make as much stuff for Halloween as they did for more commercial holidays like Christmas. Secondly, masks were basically fragile children’s toys. Many of them did not survive Halloween, let alone 60-some-odd years in an attic. Those two factors make vintage masks hard to find and expensive, especially ones with their original boxes.

Vintage masks are made of a rigid plastic that is molded to shape a child’s face. That being said, they can be tricky to display against a flat surface like a wall. A bushy wreath is the perfect alternative. Most times, you can just nestle the masks into the branches, and they will stay put. If not, don't be afraid to poke a branch through an eye or mouth hole to hold the mask in place.

For the same reasons that a wreath is a great mask display option, so is a Halloween tree. Again, the fluffy branches make it easy to showcase a mask collection. Placing a mask between two branches is often all that's needed for support. You can always use the branch-through-an-eye-hole trick for a more secure placement. Plus, the masks make great "ornaments" for your tree.