Ep 93 Do Men Need to Wear Makeup for TV Media Interviews April 2 16

Do men have to wear makeup for television? Media interviews.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

This question comes from Jared Breaux at the Brocast, one of my professional colleagues whom I have a lot of respect for. The simple answer is yes, of course men have to wear makeup. Here's the problem. Everyone on TV for the most part, wears makeup. Every news anchor, TV reporter, sitcom star, movie star. So every man and every woman you see on your TV screen for the most, there are exceptions, but for the most part they are wearing makeup. So when you don't wear makeup, you're the one who stands out. It's kind of like showing up at a pool party wearing a tuxedo or showing up at a formal black tie dinner party wearing a. A swimming suit. Swimming suits are fine on certain occasions. Tuxedos are fine on certain occasions. But when you don't use the right thing at the right time, it looks weird. And that's the problem with showing up on television without makeup. Now, the question was specific to men. I guess the assumption is it's fine for women to wear makeup or need to because this might be unfair. You could say this is a sexist generalization, but a very high, obviously a much higher percentage of women wear makeup on a daily basis than do men. Certainly in the United States and in Western cultures and in many, many cultures. And it certainly is not considered unusual or odd for women to wear makeup in general or on television. A lot of men still have the sense that, oh, it's not masculine to wear makeup. About eight years. I mean, I've been doing how to videos on public speaking and media training for Many, many years, 20 years plus on YouTube since about six months after YouTube was founded. One of the early videos I did on YouTube was specific to how men should apply makeup. Now this had tens of. It's no longer up unfortunately, but there were tens of thousands of views for this video. The interesting thing to me was how vicious and nasty some of the comments were. You can't imagine how nasty the bile that came out of people just because I was giving simple how to information how men should wear makeup. So let's hop right into the basic advice I do give my professional clients. Now with men it is a little different than women in that you really don't want to be seen as wearing makeup. So what the makeup does is it doesn't dramatically improve your looks, but it does keep you from getting from looking worse. Because a lot of people under the Harsh lights of a TV studio will look much worse than usual. Someone looks fine in person. You put them on set without any makeup and their features can look waxy, they can get a little bit of a shine on, their nose is shining, their forehead is shiny. So here's what I consider the minimum. And forgive me those of you who are listening on the audio only version of this podcast, I am holding up now some basic mosaic powder. It's a bunch of powder, different colors. I take a brush, I swirl it around, and by the way, I've already done this today because I've been making a lot of shows and I just put it all over my face, my forehead, mostly my nose. And that diminishes the shine. So I'm not trying to dramatically alter my looks. Makeup is not going to all of a sudden turn me into a heart throb. It's not going to make me George Clooney or Brad Pitt. But what it does is reduce the shine. Therefore things are less distracting. So that's one, that's really the only thing that you have to do, in my opinion. The other thing the powder does is it eliminates some of the five o' clock shadow. Now, these days, more and more men have beards. You're not trying to cover it up. And if you are clean shaven and you don't want to look like you have a five o' clock shadow, a little powder will minimize that. That's the basic thing you need to do to just look a little bit better. Not look waxy, not look shiny, not look plastic. There are a few other relatively easy things to do. Some of you are going to laugh at me, but I'm revealing all to you. As you may have noticed, those of you who watch the video portion, I don't have a lot of hair. Now, I'm not going to put a wig on for you or spray paint my head. But what I do is I actually do put powder on my forehead. Excuse me, not my forehead, the top of my head. This doesn't make me look like I have a big thick head of hair. But what it does, and I blend this in, is it takes the shine away from my scalp. So when you're watching me, you don't see this instant shine coming off my forehead. Now, certainly you don't have to do this. And if you have a thick head of hair, you don't need to do this. But for men with thin hair, and women could do this too, if you have thin hair, a balding head, just putting powder on the top of here. Now, you can use regular mosaic powder, too. And I'm certainly not doing like black spray paint because that would be more noticeable. But by putting powder on your forehead, it simply reduces the shine. What little remnants of hair you do have left is, in my case, it can just look like short hair. My case, almost all white, gray hair. Opposed to the focus being on the shine of the scalp. Other things you can do if you have any kind of blemishes. You may have noticed I have dark circles under my eyes. Now, if I'm really doing a big fancy TV production or commercial, I will take the time and put a foundation. This is just a cream that's the same color of my skin, and I will put it underneath my eyes. I don't really do it on a regular basis because it can be irritating to the skin. And I think for most people who are watching this show on laptops, on iPads, on cell phones, you can't really see my eyes closely enough for it to matter. Now, there's one other thing. Everybody has certain flaws and everybody has some level of vanity. I'm going to show you. And again, those of you listening on the podcast, this may be one that you want to go to our YouTube channel and see. I have unfortunately not only losing that hair on my head, my eyebrows are so thin now, essentially, my eyebrows are balding. Forgive me if that's too much information for you. So what I do is I don't paint eyebrows on, but what I do is I take a darker powder and I will just go over the contours my eyebrows so that it is more of a contrast. Because when I'm under the bright lights of the studio, what eyebrows I do have can disappear. So now I look like a face with someone who's had their eyebrows shaven off. It just looks weirder. You don't have to do this. This is a minor thing. All you really need in my view, if you're a man most of the time, unless you have particular cosmetic challenges, powder takes away the shine, takes away the glare. If you do have other either dark circles under the eyes, really dark moles that you're concerned about, you cut yourself shaving, then having some kind of foundation. But don't try to give yourself a fan. There's a certain. I don't want to even mention his name because we talk about him so often. There's a certain politician who basically has the color of orange on his skin. It's widely speculated that he just puts way too much tanning spray on. I'm not in favor of makeup to give yourself a tan. The problem is it's very hard to match it around your eyes. If your hands come up and your hands are just a completely different color and 10 shades lighter than your skin, it just sort of screams out phoniness and fakeness and that's why I don't recommend it. So those are the basics on men and make up for TV.

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker? For more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter J. Walker.

In our media training segment for today, what doesn't work? Sarcasm. A lot of people think they're being funny and cute. They, they get quoted in the media and the sarcasm, the humor part doesn't come out. Case in point. This happened recently in a very high profile case involving the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan and the website Gawker. The former editor was being deposed or he was in the courtroom. Albert J. Dilario it's an invasion of privacy lawsuit brought about by Hulk Hogan. The website had posted video of Hulk Hogan having sex with a friend's wife. Don't ask. But the lawyer for the other side says, can you imagine a situation where a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy? And the Gawker editor said if there were a child and the lawyer said under what age? A now? Later the editor said he was just being sarcastic, just being flippant. The problem is the Drudge Report. Numerous, numerous websites all over the world were quoting Gawker editor saying only under age 4, implying that if a celebrity were having sex with a five year old, a six year old, they would still run the video, destroy the privacy. It made Gawker, not to mention this particular editor, seem incredibly crass, disgusting, just horrific monsters. And it created sympathy for Hulk Hogan. And that's really the problem here, folks. Be very, very careful, especially if you're in litigation or you're in any high profile situation where things can be misinterpreted. Humor works when someone is in the room with you, when they can see your tone of voice, see the uplifted eyebrow. But when it's converted into text and edited down and taken out of context, as is inevitable in a high profile situation with media coverage, you can end up looking like a complete idiot. And that's really the problem here. So folks, remember, humor, sarcasm not going to work for you in times of crisis when there are a lot of people covering the news story. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me today. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

Speaking with TJ Walker is the number one rated daily streaming TV and radio show devoted to all aspects of speaking and communication. If you received value from this show, then please subscribe to it@mediatrainingworldwide.com Please review the show, leave comments and share it with your friends and colleagues today.