This has been a question asked by a lot of actors, show presenters for ages now. Your guess is right, mostly only by the men folk. Women have always been passionate about makeup and most women beautifully reinvent themselves time and again both on & off stage. However our topic of discussion limits us to the stage only. This question has been asked time & again and particularly when the play is dealing with a social or family subject in a contemporary time zone. The answer for this is always a big YES.

We need to understand and realize that makeup plays a vital role in both detailing our facial contours effectively under those bright lights and also helping the audience sitting beyond the tenth row from the proscenium to catch a detailed view of the expressions delivered by the actors. Most of the male actors try to judge their makeup in a dull or ordinarily lit green room. Under the ordinary lights, you always seem to have overdone your makeup. Actors become conscious and keep requesting the makeup artist to dull their makeup against his wish. A good and confident makeup artist would guide the actor properly, explaining to him the difference between the light intensity in the green room and that on the stage. The intensity of lights used on stage for the play are many times more than the regular lighting around us in daily life.

This now drives us to that point of the discussion where we need to check if the green room provided to us has the right kind of lighting. Typically a properly panned green room must have full size mirrors with lights fixed around the mirror. This facilitates the light to fall on the actor from the front and not from the ceiling or from behind the actor.

Also we need to understand that the intensity of the makeup will also depend on the genre, period of the play and also the character that particular artist will be portraying.

Some of the world famous makeup artists for the stage are Kate Griffiths, Stan Winston, William. J. Tuttle, Farida Rizwan and our own Chennai’s stage makeup artist Perambur Kumar.  

So the next time you are stepping on stage make sure you have your makeup on.