The first time someone suggested I wear makeup for a performance, I laughed. Not a polite laugh — a genuine, involuntary bark of disbelief. I was a strategy consultant who had recently started incorporating magic into keynote presentations. Makeup was for actors, for television personalities, for drag performers. It was not for a forty-something Austrian man performing mentalism at a corporate event in Graz.
Then I saw the video.
A colleague had filmed one of my performances at a conference — a two-hundred-person room, raised stage, standard corporate lighting rig. I watched the footage expecting to review my timing and delivery. Instead, I spent the entire viewing trying to figure out where my face had gone.
Under the stage lights, my features had flattened into a pale, undifferentiated blur. My eyes, which I had worked so hard to use for connection and communication, were invisible. The shadows under my brow made me look exhausted. My skin reflected the harsh overhead lights in a way that made me look like I was sweating profusely, even though the room had been cool. The audience could hear my personality. They could not see it.
The Problem Nobody Warns You About
Here is what I have learned about stage lighting and human faces: standard stage lighting is designed to illuminate a space, not to flatter a face. The lights are bright, they come from above and in front, and they wash out natural skin tones and facial contours. What looks perfectly fine in a mirror under bathroom lighting looks like a ghost under a fresnel.
Dan Harlan’s Tarbell lecture on magic as theater includes a detailed section on lighting, and one point struck me hard: the performer’s face is the primary communication tool. If the audience cannot read your expressions, you have lost one of the most powerful channels of connection available to you. Lighting design can help — warmer tones, better angles, reduced harshness. But even the best lighting cannot fully compensate for the way stage conditions flatten facial features.
This is where makeup enters the picture. Not theatrical makeup. Not stage paint. Not anything that would be visible to someone standing three feet away. Just enough correction to ensure that what the audience sees from ten or twenty or fifty meters away resembles what you actually look like in person.
The Resistance
My resistance to makeup was cultural, generational, and deeply personal. I grew up in Austria in an era when men did not wear makeup. Full stop. The idea felt vain, theatrical, and fundamentally not who I was. I was a consultant and entrepreneur who happened to perform magic. I was not a performer who happened to consult. The distinction mattered to me, even if it was increasingly artificial.
The resistance lasted until I watched three more videos from three different events. In each one, the same problem. Flat face, invisible eyes, washed-out skin. In each one, the audio was engaging — my timing was improving, my delivery was getting more natural, the audiences were responding. But the visual component was undermining everything. I looked tired and anonymous under every lighting rig I encountered.
I started paying attention to other performers. Not just magicians — keynote speakers, TEDx presenters, corporate trainers. The ones who looked vibrant and alive on camera and on stage all shared something in common. Their faces had definition. Their eyes were visible. Their skin had warmth. And I gradually realized that for at least some of them, this was not natural. It was preparation.
The Basics I Wish Someone Had Told Me
What I eventually learned, through embarrassing trial and error and one very patient consultation with a makeup artist at a television studio in Vienna, can be summarized in a few principles that would have saved me months of looking like a ghost on stage.
First, foundation matters. Not full coverage, not anything that looks or feels like a mask. A tinted moisturizer or light foundation that matches your skin tone — and I cannot stress this enough, that matches your skin tone, not a shade lighter or darker — will prevent the washed-out effect that stage lighting creates. The goal is to look like yourself, but with enough pigment to survive bright lights.
Second, eyebrows and eyes. This was the revelation. Under stage lighting, eyebrows fade. Without defined eyebrows, the face loses its architecture. A simple eyebrow pencil, used lightly, restores the structure that lighting steals. Similarly, a subtle darkening around the eyes — not eyeliner in the traditional sense, but a slight definition of the eye socket — ensures that the audience can see where you are looking. And as every source I have ever read on performance craft emphasizes, eye contact is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. If your eyes are invisible, eye contact is impossible.
Third, powder. Stage lights generate heat, and heat generates sweat, and sweat generates shine. A light translucent powder eliminates the reflection that makes you look like you are melting under pressure. This alone transformed my on-camera appearance more than any other single product.
Fourth, and this is the one that surprised me most: lips. Under harsh lighting, lips lose color and definition. A tinted lip balm — literally the most subtle product imaginable — prevents the washed-out mouth that makes speakers look unwell on stage. I use one that is essentially invisible up close but provides just enough color to read from thirty meters away.
The Application Ritual
My current pre-show routine includes about four minutes of what I privately call “face preparation.” I do not call it makeup. I do not think of it as makeup. I think of it as the same category of preparation as checking my microphone levels, testing the lighting, and organizing my props. It is a technical requirement of performing under artificial light.
The products live in a small zippered pouch in my performance case, next to my spare batteries and backup cables. Tinted moisturizer, eyebrow pencil, translucent powder, tinted lip balm. Four products, four minutes, and the difference on camera and on stage is dramatic.
I apply everything in the venue bathroom or greenroom, under the harshest fluorescent light I can find. This is counterintuitive — most people would want flattering light for makeup application. But the point is not to look good in the bathroom mirror. The point is to look natural under stage conditions. If the application looks slightly too defined under fluorescent light, it will look perfect under stage light. If it looks perfect under fluorescent light, it will be invisible on stage.
The Gender Thing
I am going to address this directly because I know it is the barrier for many male performers, particularly those of us who came to performance from non-theatrical backgrounds.
Wearing makeup for performance is not about gender or vanity. It is about communication. Your face is your instrument. Stage lighting degrades that instrument’s ability to communicate. Makeup is the correction that restores what lighting takes away.
Every male news anchor on television wears makeup. Every male actor on every screen you have ever watched wears makeup. Every politician who appears on camera wears makeup. They do not do this because they are vain. They do it because they understand that the camera and the stage light change how skin looks, and the correction is invisible to the audience but transformative for communication.
Scott Alexander, in his masterclass on stage performance, discusses the importance of visual presentation at length. The audience forms an impression of you in the first seconds — before you have said a word, before you have performed a single effect. That impression is based on what they see. If what they see is a washed-out, flat-featured figure under harsh lights, the impression is one of tiredness, age, and low energy. If what they see is a vibrant, defined, warm-looking human being, the impression is one of vitality and confidence.
The four minutes of preparation determines which impression you make.
What I Got Wrong at First
My first attempts were terrible. I used a foundation that was too dark for my skin, which made me look like I had applied self-tanner unevenly. I used too much eyebrow pencil, which gave me an expression of permanent surprise. I forgot the powder, and by the second half of a forty-minute set, the foundation had mixed with sweat and created a patchy, uneven mess that was worse than wearing nothing at all.
The turning point was the television studio consultation. A professional makeup artist looked at my skin tone under different lighting conditions and showed me exactly which products to use and how to apply them. The entire consultation took thirty minutes and cost less than a decent deck of cards. It was one of the best investments I have made in my performance career.
If you are serious about performing — on stage, on camera, or in any environment with artificial lighting — I would suggest finding a makeup artist, explaining that you need a minimal, natural-looking correction for stage conditions, and asking them to teach you a five-minute routine. Most will be delighted to help. It is a refreshingly practical request compared to what they usually deal with.
The Larger Principle
Makeup is not really about makeup. It is about the gap between how you think you look and how you actually look under performance conditions. That gap exists in everything — your voice sounds different through speakers than it does in your head, your movements read differently from fifty meters than they do in your practice mirror, your facial expressions that feel dramatic to you may be invisible to the back row.
The discipline of checking — of watching the video, of asking trusted observers, of testing under real conditions — is the discipline that separates performers who look professional from those who look amateur. Makeup is just one expression of that discipline. The willingness to see yourself as the audience sees you, rather than as you imagine yourself to be, is the underlying skill.
I resisted for years. I wish I had not. Four products, four minutes, and the audience can finally see what I have been trying to show them all along.