"Foxy Ladies: Why one network applies so much makeup" By Liza Mundy at the Atlantic [View all]

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Foxy Ladies: Why one network applies so much makeup

By Liza Mundy at the Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/foxy-ladies/309054/?en=1

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But here’s the newer development: It’s not just anchors who are pressured to look good while talking, it’s relatively ordinary women, too. For a contingent of female bloggers, ideologues, advocates, pundits, and writers, a Fox gig brings with it an unexpected dilemma. There you are, a renowned expert on nuclear proliferation/immigration policy/­the Middle East, obliged to regard yourself in the mirror and ask: Will I really go on national television looking like a cross between Captain Jack Sparrow and a waitress from Hooters?

Not that you have much of a choice. “I see that you like a natural look,” a Fox makeup artist said to me, then proceeded to paint a red line slightly outside the edge of my lips, and fill it in with ample gloss. A stylist curled my hair and teased it; when she asked if I wore it flipped up or under, I said under. She flipped it up, venturing that “up is cuter.” Other artists told me that if network executives don’t like what they see on a guest, the phone rings promptly. (Fox did not respond to requests for comment.)

Fox no doubt has several reasons for pursuing the look one guest described as “Fox glam.” The advent of high-­definition TV screens is probably one of them: saturated colors (including, conveniently, red) work well in HD. And then there’s the management. Gabriel Sherman, a journalist working on a book about Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, notes makeup’s unique role in Ailes’s creation myth, which dates to a fateful encounter with Richard Nixon. When Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, many said that his fate had been sealed by bad makeup during a televised debate. Before an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show seven years later, Nixon groused about having to stoop so low as to go on television; Ailes, the executive producer for the show, persuaded him to embrace the medium, and the makeup. Nixon hired him to work on his next presidential campaign, and won.

Ailes, Sherman points out, under-stands that while TV news may be journalism, it is also entertainment. “He works like a Broadway producer,” says Sherman (indeed, at one point Ailes was a Broadway producer). That, Sherman says, is why Fox sets look like stage sets: “The colors are brighter, the camera angles faster. Everything pops on the screen more, every­thing is eye candy.”

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