How to make a Joy running costume

When I ran the Disney World 10k I decided to dress up as Joy from Inside Out as one of my costumes! She is one of my favorite characters ever. It’s funny, because even as someone who can suffer from depression and anxiety, I relate a lot to Joy. I can be extremely passionate, excited, and happy – especially when it comes to all things Disney!

My original thought was to do a Joy running costume for the 5k of Dopey Challenge weekend, and then do Minnie Mouse for the 10k since Minnie was on the medal. However, when they replaced the medal with Oswald I decided to switch the two. Believe it or not, I thought running in the Minnie headband would be more annoying than running in the wig!

Because I was committed to wearing the wig. If I was going to do Joy, I needed the blue hair. This costume is actually really simple when it comes down to it, and is actually mostly just reusing the pieces from my Halloween costume a few years ago. I also wore the dress when I had my Inside Out birthday party, so at least it’s getting a lot of use!

So here’s how I put together my Joy running costume!

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This outfit really only consists of 2 main parts – the dress and the wig. For the dress, I happened to have a Joy dress I’d gotten at Hot Topic a few years ago. They don’t sell it anymore (though you may be able to find it used on places like Poshmark), but there are alternatives. There are Joy costumes you can find out there, which could be okay, though I’m not sure what the material is like and they’re a little pricey. They do come with a wig though.

If I was doing it again and didn’t already have the dress, I would buy a cheap dress like this one and then paint the flowers on myself. The one I shared looks very similar in style to the one that I wore. Just get some fabric paint and blue flowers are relatively easy! I wore the dress over a pair of shorts and a sports bra.

I happened to have this wig from Halloween. It helps that Joy’s hair is supposed to look just a little bit wild and sticking up, so I didn’t have to worry about the wig being perfect. I never thought I’d run in a wig, but it actually wasn’t that bad. I used a lot of bobby pins tosecure it in place and I never worried about it coming off during the run. I did take the 10k pretty slowly since I still had a half marathon and full marathon to go – I don’t think I would wear the wig for a longer distance or a more serious race!

The only other thing I had as part of this outfit was my compression socks from ProCompression. I would actually choose yellow socks if I was doing this outfit again, but I didn’t realize until the last minute that I wanted my yellow ones for my orange bird costume (to represent his yellow feet!). So I used blue ones instead to match the hair.

Believe it or not this whole costume was pretty comfortable to run in – and I thought it was pretty fun, too!

Check out my other running costumes here:

What do you think of my Joy running costume? What character should I dress as for my next RunDisney event?

So here’s how I put together my Joy running costume!

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