The Complicated History Behind the Hair and Makeup of Female News Anchors

When one very famous blonde news anchor cut her hair, “it was empowering; it was so powerful,” says Vincenza Carovillano, a makeup artist who has worked at Fox News, NBC, ABC, and CBS and whose skills are admired by competitors and anchorwomen alike. She applauded the anchorwoman’s decision to chop off many layers of blonde.

“It almost feels like you’re cutting off layers of bullshit,” Carovillano explains. It was an important personal statement, she continues: “Like, here I am!”

The journalist had evolved: With one swift snip, she had gone from a lengthy tousled hairstyle she privately described to close friends as “fuck me” — meaning the frenzied piles of tresses were intended to seduce viewers — to the short, severe cut she described as “fuck you.” Within months she had muted her lip color to a nude, highlighted with just a touch of champagne gloss. All around TV news, there’s a quiet revolution taking place. Not necessarily a successful revolution, but then most revolts start small.

“It’s disconcerting that there should be so much pressure to be überglamorous,” says Katie Couric, a veteran anchor of CBS, NBC, ABC, and Yahoo! News, who’s currently partnering with National Geographic on a documentary series about pressing social issues. “I just don’t think turning everyone into a Barbie doll is a good thing. It’s very objectifying to women. I want to look more like the people watching me.” For example, she adds, “I didn’t want to wear a hugely expensive couture Dolce & Gabbana suit because a) I’m frugal and b) I don’t like the message it sends — it wasn’t me.”

Mind you, she adds, “I don’t want people vomiting while watching me. I want to look normal.”

“Normal” is not exactly what many network executives have in mind for their female on-air news stars, however — and these days the news queens they hire and promote are highly attuned to what is expected. As any stylist will tell you, beautifying the beauties is no easy task, partly because the work itself requires so much more than mere surface enhancement. Into the hands of their embellishers, anchors pour their doubts, fears, and desires: above all, the desire to look not simply better than their competitors but a lot better than nature made them. And to achieve this, they will try almost anything.

“Among the biggest distractions on TV? Hands down, it’s high-shine lip gloss because that’s all you can focus on when you look at the anchor’s face,” explains Kathy Pomerantz, who was head of hair and makeup at Al Jazeera America until it shuttered last year and these days works occasionally on Joy Behar and other network stars. “You look at high-shine gloss, and you think: What did that anchor say just now? If there’s a lot of gloss, I get distracted. A little bit of gloss on the lips is a lot on camera. I call them dancing lips.”

(Even Couric admits to this particular failing. “Maybe I went a little heavy on the lip gloss” back in the old days, she concedes. “It was just a habit.”)

But as all beauty professionals know: Lip gloss makes TV regulars look younger — and on television, the appearance of youth, at least among women, is always paramount. It is true that Brianna Keilar, CNN’s senior Washington correspondent, wears a touch of peach gloss. But on Fox, the gloss pots seem to runneth over. Janet Flora, a makeup artist for CNBC’s Closing Bell and a frequent makeup artist on the Today show, is among the many who point out: “It appears to my trained eye, Fox News — they simply wear much too much makeup.” Which is a delicate way of putting it.

A more candid assessment from a makeup artist who freelances: “I mean, frankly, to me, those smart women on Fox look like bimbos.”

Bimboism on the news is a relative novelty. Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, female anchors on all TV news sets wore demure jackets, matte lipstick, and tame — occasionally severe — hairdos. “I had my hair cut very short, like Winona Ryder,” Couric recalls of one disastrous episode when she went from short to severe. “Then I learned I don’t look like Winona Ryder.”

Then along came Fox News. Goodbye, Winona. Hello, extensions.

“The Foxification of our look has made things completely different — it seemed to me, coming up at the time, that it was Fox that changed everything: a Victoria’s Secret ethos driving what you look like on TV,” acknowledges newswoman Jami Floyd, who used to appear regularly as a commentator on Fox News shows. “It’s a cable phenomenon. There is a whole department devoted to makeup and hair at Fox, and it didn’t matter which show you were on — the look was consistent. Their people seemed to put a lot of makeup on, and certainly a lot of eyelashes. The women wear skirts and heels.”

Even though the F-word never drops from her lips, it’s possible that Couric has been watching Fox News as well: “The super tight, low-cut sleeveless dresses I see on TV news I always feel are more appropriate for a cocktail party,” says Couric. “I don’t want to sound like [Saturday Night Live’s] Church Lady, but a little goes a long way.”

Ask makeup artist Carovillano for the reason behind all this embellishment, and she replies with just two blunt words: “Sex appeal.”

And she’s adamant about this. The expectations for male anchors are not as exacting as those for their female counterparts, she observes. “The minute you do one thing wrong, they blast you,” she says. Women “are held to such a high, high standard. And you need to look good, be beautiful, because if you don’t, you get turned off.”

Floyd puts it more bluntly: “The TV news business is a tough business to be in, and it can get nasty at times.”

Despite its recent management shake-up following allegations of harassment, it is still Fox that sets the ultrapulchritude trend. At Fox, dresses are offered by the network as an option to the anchors, many of whom have lashes that are painstakingly individually applied. “If it’s news, I want to make it pop,” says Carovillano. “That’s what we say [in the business]: You want to make it pop!”

And Fox’s competitors follow suit — to an extent. At CNN, for instance, home of some much-vaunted serious news shows, Poppy Harlow wears demure white blouses with high, round necklines and Fox refugee Alisyn Camerota wears modest Nine West heels and muted lip color. But Camerota’s dresses (which she steams herself) are invariably jewel tone, a standard set by her former employer. And the upper lids of many CNN women are lined with strips of dark false eyelashes.

Try telling a certain financial journalist to tone down the lip gloss, the thick eyeliner, the fake lashes, and — according to a makeup artist who attempted this years ago — you are likely to hear, “No! This is how I like it!” Or when all pleas for cosmetic restraint fail: “OK, then I’ll do it myself.” Nor are women the only ones pursuing glamour: Many years ago, when appearing as a guest on a news show, I noticed one male anchor (with excellent hair) had his own special brush, a natural-bristle groomer, which was kept pristine inside its own special bag.

“The younger women can be the worst. If someone says, ‘I want beachy waved hair and smoky eyes’ one more time — that can send me reeling!” says Flora. “Often it’s because they’re concerned with what’s up-to-the-minute more than what flatters them the most.”

A heavy sigh from Flora. “Frankly, I don’t know what beachy waves are,” she manages finally. “And also, how do you define ‘smoky eye’? Do you want a Kardashian smoky eye with so much shadow and makeup? Or a smoky eye with no visual definition at all? I mean, what does ‘I want a smoky eye’ mean?”

It means, as the beauty experts of cable news will tell you, that insecurity can rule in the makeup room. Crying jags, fears of being fired or being demoted, the treachery of boyfriends: It all gets unpacked here. “You spend so much time with them. Your face is in their face — an inch away — for 40 whole minutes. It’s so intimate!” Carovillano explains. Pomerantz notes, “When you have someone touching your face every day, in your face, they’ll tell you their secrets.”

“Everything, everything!” says Pomerantz. “If only I could write a book about it all, it would be a number-one best-seller. Listen, we are literally eye-to-eye with these anchors, in front of their face, creating a look — and they are trusting you. You become their therapist. What’s said in the makeup room stays in the makeup room.”

Well, up to a point.

“You hear, ‘Why isn’t he texting me? It’s been three days since we saw each other, and not a word,’ ” reports Pomerantz.

“I always say, ‘Well what do you think it means? I want to hear what you think.’ ”

Not “Well, since he hasn’t texted, he’s obviously not that into you.”

That’s definitely not an option. “Forget it! I would never say anything like that to them right before they are about to go on the air,” says Pomerantz. “What you do is you calm them down. You get them distracted.”

From long experience, Pomerantz knows exactly what to do about weepy anchors. “When tears are running down their face, you use an airbrush, and you just blot, blot, blot with a tissue and a sponge — you never wipe,” she explains. “If the anchor is crying, or sweating, you can also pick a small fan out of the makeup cart, and you make them hold it in their lap [to blow air on their face]. Now the eye shadow is going to be a bit difficult when they cry, but a little concealer around the eye works.”

Indeed, paradoxical though it may seem, there aren’t all that many enduring crises on television news sets — at least behind the scenes.

Hair a mess? Not such a big deal. “Mostly the front of your head is what is seen the most,” says stylist Chris Curich, who jumped from Fox to NBC with Megyn Kelly. “So our number-one priority is to make the front of your head look good.”

NBC

Bald spot somewhere on a man? “Caboki hair fibers fill it in — the product gives color to the scalp,” says Pomerantz. “And if a woman hasn’t had time to get her roots done, I will take brown mascara and go over the hair growing out and cover the gray with that.”

Unwashed hair? “Yes, if a person comes in without having washed their hair, that can be a big mess,” concedes Diane D’Agostino, who works on the hair for Live With Kelly and Ryan. “But then we add dry shampoo to the hair, and that fixes things. You never, ever say, ‘Oh, I can’t do anything with your hair.’ ”

If you ask certain news anchors, the charmed beneficiaries of all this care and embellishment, they are of two minds. On the one hand, as one of their number observes, “Much of what my network does is helpful: It’s helpful having someone style you every day, someone saying, ‘Here’s what you can wear’ or ‘Here’s what you cannot wear,’ because it takes out the guesswork. I am grateful to have no fuss and no muss. To have someone saying, ‘Here are the shoes you should wear with that dress; here is the necklace’ — that’s great.”

On the other hand, all that fuss and care can be infantilizing, not to mention burdensome. Ask Floyd about both the spoken and unspoken aesthetic rules that governed her life before she left television news to become a radio regular (specifically a host of All Things Considered for WNYC New York Public Radio), and her response is swift.

“I was tired of my 20 years sitting in the makeup room, getting my hair and makeup done,” she says.

Floyd was tired as well of accepting certain network dicta — some obvious, others muted. “I would never have been hired if I were wearing an Afro,” she recalls. “So yes, I wore my hair longer and did what I was told. But for me it was a really difficult decision to straighten it. I have to be honest. You are capitulating to an Anglo-Saxon aesthetic. I don’t deny that.”

Well, that was then.

“The first thing I did once I left television news for radio was cut my hair,” she continues. And after that, she had even more snipped off. “See, I looked around and I saw President Obama had short hair; Hillary, too.”

Also, “I don’t wear my contacts anymore. I wear glasses. I see better, and it’s less glamorous and perhaps more intimidating.”

Anything else?

“I just dramatically reduced the makeup,” Floyd concludes. “I still wear a little mascara, some tinted sunscreen, and lip gloss. But that’s it.”

In other words: another perfectly executed “fuck you.”

A version of this article originally appeared in the December 2017 issue of Allure. To get your copy, head to newsstands or subscribe now.