About Mitt's make-up -- [View all]

[Hell Hath No Fury]

I hate to break it to you, but bad make-up happens. Especially make-up for TV. It is 100% normal in the industry to put on base that is many, many shades darker than the person's skin tone. The studio lights seriously wash out a persons complexion so the darker make-up is added to account for that. Local TV anchors are notorious for this, and even some network guys go too heavy. Keith Olbermann's make-up was VERY heavy, including the darkened skin and heavy shading to thin his face and double chin. Look at just about any anchor/TV head -- look first at their faces, then at their hands or above their wrists. Chris Matthews is someone who wears a buttload of make-up to stop from looking like Caspar onscreen. Whoever did Mitt's make-up (generally done by the stations on staff make-up artists - they are most familiar with the lighting set-up) did a not great job -- perhaps, on purpose.

For those of old enough to remember Al Gore's first debate with Bush, he was a victim of VERY bad make-up, so much so it was all that was talked about the next day.


"Al Gore might beg to differ. In his first debate with George W. Bush, Gore appeared in orange makeup applied thickly to cover a sunburn. He looked awful. Commentators compared him to Lurch from The Addams Family, "Herman Munster doing a bad Ronald Reagan impression," and "a big, orange, waxy, wickless candle." One columnist wrote that "it looked like he melted down orange circus peanuts and then asked Tammy Faye for a 'light' dusting." San Francisco Examiner television critic Tim Goodman landed one of the most quoted blows: "If you'd stuck him in a push-up bra and a sequin dress and had him sing show tunes, he'd have carried San Francisco in a landslide."

The vice president became The Man Who Wears Too Much Makeup. The label has endured as a trope of late-night comedians - "If Al Gore took off half his makeup and gave it to Warren Christopher, they'd both look a lot better," said Jay Leno recently - and as color for political journalists. This isn't just fun at the vice president's expense. Commentators treat Gore's pancake problem as if it has deeper significance. It makes him seem bumbling, unmanly, and, most of all, phony. "While Gore yammered about [the voters'] 'will,' it was clear to my houseplants that the man who looks like he raids Katherine Harris' pancake makeup supply was really gloating about the Florida Supreme Court decision in his favor," opined a disillusioned Gore voter in late November.

http://reason.com/archives/2000/12/11/electoral-beauty-myths

I used to do this for a living. I am the last person to defend Romney, but I believe it really is just a case of bad make-up, and not anything bigoted/untoward.