Ossoff makeup ads hint of Collins’ flagging foundation
September is here, and election silly season is back in full force.
According to the latest wave of TV ads, the GOP wants me to believe U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff is kind of a girly man, as Saturday Night Live’s Hans and Franz would say.
A report from The Washington Free Beacon revealed Ossoff’s campaign this year has paid an Atlanta-area makeup artist $2,887, according to campaign disclosure reports.
A Republican super PAC working in support of GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins grabbed that tidbit and created an ad with a meaty-faced actor sitting on a forklift and wincing at the fact that Ossoff uses makeup.
“He spends more money than any other Washington politician on hair and makeup,” says forklift dude. “I know what you’re thinking — yes, even more than the ladies.” (More on that later.)
He goes on to call the Democratic Ossoff a “phony” and a “pretty boy” who needs “to put down the mascara and join the real world.”
The ad also has AI-generated photos of Ossoff getting manicured, having his hair blown dry and receiving a facial. Ossoff complained last year when Collins’ campaign employed AI to have him saying stuff he hadn’t.
The goal is to air those commercials during college football games, figuring the pigskin crowd doesn’t go for that kind of thing.
The ad reeks of a flailing candidate closing his eyes and trying to land a haymaker. Collins’ campaign has been a hot mess of ethics allegations and charges of antisemitism, racism and aggravated stupidity from a family member and former aides.
The Wall Street Journal this week wrote an article headlined “The GOP Senate Campaign Gone Disastrously Wrong in Georgia.”
Now, I’m not a wagering fellow, but I’d bet a jelly-filled doughnut that Collins, a meaty-faced guy himself, has had his face powdered a time or two for television appearances.
His campaign didn’t respond to say what foundation, if any, he uses. (Ossoff’s did, saying he is facing a desperate opponent.)
If Collins doesn’t get touched up for TV appearances, then his campaign is committing malpractice.
Remember sweaty old Richard Nixon? Political folklore has it that he lost his tight election in 1960 to John F. Kennedy partly because of a makeup malfunction.
The dark-whiskered Nixon, who was pale from a hospital visit, declined an offer from CBS to have a makeup artist work on him before the televised debate. However, at the last moment, a staffer rushed out to buy something called Lazy Shave, which was described as “a color cake for between shaves.” Then they lathered up Tricky Dick.
Viewers thought Nixon looked ill, especially compared to the tanned Kennedy. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley reportedly said: “My God, they’ve embalmed him before he even died.”
I must admit to having had my face prepared for TV’s bright lights a few times.
Once, I was set to appear on Nancy Grace’s show on CNN to talk about some horrible murder.
I had appeared on her show a couple times before, but this time they encouraged me to get made up, saying I’d come across better. I agreed and was led to a barber’s chair in a mirrored, overly bright room. I noticed two blond women in chairs next to me being attended to by teams working with the intensity of NASCAR pit crews.
Then they spun around the chair next to me, and I was momentarily flummoxed by the vision: It was Nancy Grace staring at me intensely in full TV war paint. It was unnerving, I must admit. In person, someone who is made up and TV-ready appears as an exaggerated version of themselves.
I spoke with Tymeka McNeal Juniors, a makeup artist who very well might have been in the CNN room that day. She has spent decades in the business.
Juniors, who runs the Blend Beauty Group, worked for CNN for 14 years and then WSB-TV, where she was personal makeup assistant for, and close friend of, the station’s popular anchor, the late Jovita Moore.
“I’ve done thousands and thousands of faces,” she said. “I tell people I get paid to play with Barbie and Ken.”
“People think of it as vanity but, really, it’s a technical necessity,” Juniors told me. In fact, with the advent of high-definition TV, that is more true than ever.
“With the naked eye you might look fine, but if you go on without makeup, you’ll see every pore, every blemish, every mark,” she said. “We do it so your face is not shiny, pale or sickly.”
She said Ossoff has “amazing skin” and would be an easy client to work on. With Collins, “I’d probably neutralize the redness of his skin.”
Sometimes, Juniors added, “we have to pull teeth on males to do it.”
There is a stigma with makeup and dudes.
And that’s what the ads thumping Ossoff are trying to do — you know, the “even more than the ladies” line.
That refers to the fact that campaign records show Ossoff has spent more on makeup and hair care than other pols, including congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.
But that doesn’t shock me. Ossoff, like Nixon, owns a pasty face highlighted by a dark stubble. AOC never had to contend with 5 o’clock shadow.
Obviously, Ossoff isn’t the only male pol trying to upgrade his look with makeup.
President Donald Trump, aka the Big Orange Fellow, keeps a couple containers of Bronx Colors, a face makeup from Switzerland, on hand at all times to brighten up his visage, the Washington Post reported.
And Pete Hegseth, Trump’s manly secretary of war and a veteran of TV lights during his time as a Fox News host, installed a makeup studio in the Defense Department, according to a CBS News report.
“Fake news!” Hegseth’s people responded concerning the upgrade of the green room at the department.
Hegseth is doing his own makeup ahead of TV appearances, not paying for a makeup artist, a defense official told CBS News.
You get that, Jon Boy? Real men do their own makeup.