The celebrity guide to how NOT to dress on Halloween

Nothing ushers in Halloween quite like a celebrity wearing — or, this year, defending — an offensive costume.

The rules are pretty simple. There are only three: Don’t dress as the dead version of an actual dead person; avoid cultural and offensive stereotypes; and for the love of everything, don’t slather your white face in black or brown paint.

Yet every year these rules are flagrantly ignored by someone in our celebrity culture — which is bizarre when you think about it. How it possible that at no point during the locating of blackface paint, the purchasing of blackface paint, the applying of blackface paint and the actual wearing of the blackface paint, do the celebrities stop and say to themselves, “You know what, this is probably not the best idea and maybe I should just dress up as a pumpkin or something instead”?

Luckily for the rest of us, these celebs have given us several examples through the years of how not to dress for Halloween. Here are a few of the lessons learned.

If you’re going to dress like a dead celebrity, how about you don’t reference the method of death with your costume?

This one might seem pretty obvious, but if someone dies in a hospital and you want to dress up as that person, maybe don’t wear a hospital gown. That principle was apparently lost on a few celebrities over the years.

Comedian and general provocateur Bill Maher was one of them. In 2006, he decided to dress as Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter. Only problem was that Irwin was killed by a stingray months earlier — and Maher decided to incorporate this detail into his costume. The (grown, adult) man walked around with a fake stinger sticking out from a bloody wound in his chest.

He then doubled-down on his choice on his show, when he angrily refused to apologize and instead blamed Irwin for dying.

“Stop hbadling me about my Halloween costume,” he said. “People who really love animals understand if you get killed by one, chances are you were doing something to it you shouldn’t have been.”

“America’s Next Top Model” winner Adrianne Curry did something similar in 2009, when she dressed up like Amy Winehouse — the singer who died at 27 years old from alcohol poisoning and struggled with drug addiction throughout her life.

Curry didn’t just don a wig to mimic Winehouse’s distinct coiffure. She strapped a belt around her arm and carried a fake syringe, pausing to pretend to shoot heroin. Perhaps the worst part is that Winehouse was still alive and struggling with addiction when Curry played dress-up.

Don’t be a Nazi, especially if you’re a prince of an Allied country.

Prince Harry inexplicably did the complete opposite of this in 2005, when he dressed as a Nazi for a costume party. A photo of him holding a drink with a big, red swastika armband wrapped around his bicep quickly spread throughout the Internet and prompted outrage.

It wasn’t even Halloween.

Harry eventually issued a statement that he was “very sorry if I caused any offense or embarrbadment to anyone.”

“It was a poor choice of costume and I apologize,” he added.

Don’t be Nazis, y’all. It’s not a poor choice of costume; it’s a willfully provocative outfit that conjures hate and anti-Semitism. So don’t do it.

How about we leave other cultures alone?

Here are some good Halloween costumes: ghosts, vampires, zombies, Frankenstein.

Here are some bad Halloween costumes: anything that takes another person’s entire cultural identity and reduces it into something you bought for $50 from some bargain website.

Here are a few more examples:

Hillary Duff dressed up like a pilgrim for Halloween in 2016. That would have been fine — bland and unimaginative, but fine — but her then-boyfriend Jason Walsh dressed as a Native American, feathered headdress and all.

Given the history of violence against Native Americans, the costume was already offensive. But it’s timing was particularly egregious. As HuffPost reported, the costume was “particularly tone deaf given the current situation in North Dakota, where thousands of Native Americans and their supporters have been protesting the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Pipeline opponents, who started demonstrating in January, say the proposed route threatens to contaminate the community’s water source and destroy sacred grounds.”