A New Jersey state senator went on a "self-appointed undercover mission" as a homeless man earlier this week, to spotlight what he views as discrimination against single men and those with mental health issues seeking shelter.

Richard Codey, 65, called around to dozens of local homeless shelters before finding a Goodwill in Newark that would admit him without a Social Security Number.

According to a Reuters write-up of the affair, the most dramatic moment seems to have been the Goodwill's shower call, which threatened to erase an hour of painstaking (and probably costly) make-up application.

"I was terrified because I knew if I had a shower, my makeup was coming off," said Codey, whose undercover team included a makeup artist who spent nearly an hour transforming him, painting tobacco stains on his teeth and drawing broken blood vessels and dirt on his skin.

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WrestleMania blared on television for two hours until it was lights out at 10:30 p.m.

In the end, Codey, no stranger to the tricks of amateur espionage (he went undercover at a state-run psychiatric hospital while serving as a senator in 1987), was able to skate around the mandatory shower rule just by avoiding eye contact with the worker rounding men up.

The Reuters website has a couple pictures of Codey in head to toe Derilicte. He doesn't look as glamorous at Tyra Banks did when she went undercover. But he does look homeless.

The senator, also a former New Jersey governor, plans to use his findings to seek more federal funding for the homeless.

[Image via Getty]