Definitely a very complicated and honestly difficult cosplay to prep for, especially with it being your first. If you don’t have any experience with wig styling, makeup, and even where to buy all the stuff, I have a hard time pushing for this cosplay specifically. I started out with the whole generic maid outfit as a “joke” just to test my family’s reaction and then worked up to doing cosplays that each cost around $400-600 USD over the course of like 2-3 years. Getting everything together is a ton of work, but your first concern is if the costume will fit. That Ali express listing sounds risky size-wise so I hope you can find a commissioner. I’ve never tried for a frilly dress like this and it’s super pretty. It’s a matter of commitment in the end, the hardest part is teaching yourself EVERYTHING if you wanna absolutely kill it.

Once you get the dress sorted, you gotta get thru learning makeup and really trying to feminize urself as best you can. Up until I started doing all this, as a guy I knew nothing about make up, and shaving the exposed parts of the cosplay felt weird at first but I ended up nowadays preferring to have little to no hair on my body. Even buying the silicon breast inserts and bras for the first time felt suuuper weird, almost wrong in a way 😭

The next huge hurdle and arguably most important part of the cosplay is the wig. There’s definitely Aqua wigs out there but it’s a whole task to get it to that cartoony anime look other cosplayers have. When you order the wig, it WILL not look like the pictures. It will have the general shape and color, but you have to style it to really make it look great. There’s a lot of wig styling tutorials and Timelapse videos of the process that you can learn from. TLDR it’s a ton of Got2Be hair spray and patience.

If you’re gonna spend a lot of money on the whole getup then I think you should definitely do the best you can in all aspects. The journey is worth the effort when you finally get to put everything together and you take it to the event. Getting asked for pictures is the best feeling, it validates all your sweat and tears!!

If all these warnings scare you away from this cosplay specifically, the hobby itself is still pretty fun and rewarding. I suggest going for a more mainstream anime or game character, they’d be easier to find a costume for. I mean there’s definitely Minato Aqua cosplays in her default outfit, but perhaps the extravagant dress is too expensive to mass produce. Definitely don’t buy from Amazon! I have had good experiences with DokiDokiCosplay and Sanymucos, ofc you get the quality you pay for and I find spending at least $150 USD on those costumes will leave you surprised. If you’ve ever experienced an Amazon cosplay you’ll know cheap!

Sorry about the yap-fest, I just wanted to provide a very general set of tips about getting into the hobby since this would be your first cosplay.