TV’s Beauty Brokers : Fashion: With millions of Eliza Doolittles watching, late-night TV is becoming the province of makeover mavens.

Wedged between those half-hour, late-night commercials for weight-loss tapes, updated Veg-O-Matics and instant piano proficiency, Lynn Redgrave is ready to be doctored up.

In a remarkable departure for an actress, her face is stark naked. Her hair’s a wreck. But hang on. In minutes, hotshot Hollywood makeup artist Michael Maron transforms Redgrave from extre-e-e-mely natural everywoman to camera-ready sex bomb.

Flip the station and Ali MacGraw is not quite so revealing. Already coiffed and made up, she’s passionately testifying to the wonders of the “no makeup makeup” concocted by her longtime friend Victoria Jackson, another Hollywood makeup artist to the stars.

Channel-hop again and ordinary women are positively misty-eyed over how much better they feel now that Colorado-based beauty expert Linda Chae has taught them how to project a powerful versus romantic image. The feat, counsels a beaming Chae, involves understanding that curved lines telegraph warmth and friendliness whereas straight lines and angles communicate professionalism and strength.

Henry Higgins never had it so good. With millions of Eliza Doolittle insomniacs forming a core group of receptive viewers, these makeover parades are being broadcast to audiences around the world. Night after night, they’re proving what many in the beauty business have long suspected: viewers never seem to tire of glamorous makeovers--visual, flesh-and-blood proof that hope abounds for even the ugliest of ducklings.

Often more entertaining and informative than other fare offered at 3 a.m., these extravaganzas feature glorious sets and high-end production values. Like the best shows in this genre, they are so slick they’re typically mistaken for talk shows or informal seminars--especially in the half-awake eyes of viewers deprived of adequate beauty sleep. But after lassoing the audience with free tips and startling transformations, the shows quickly get to the point: a handy 800-number for instantly ordering the products and the videotapes on how to use them.

The key to getting audiences to watch these shows is in providing plenty of information, not easily available elsewhere. Thus, the long-play ads are known as “infomercials” just as hybrid news/entertainment shows are called “infotainment.”

There are three makeup infomercials that run on cable, independent and, occasionally, on network stations. Though all three shows feature a warm and compelling beauty expert with cosmetics and videotapes to sell, each program is markedly different.

“Victoria Jackson’s Beauty Breakthrough for the ‘90s” touts makeup products that look exceptionally sheer and produce the matte, no-gloss look that’s become increasingly popular of late. In the video that arrives with the products, viewers learn, for instance, how to effect dramatic makeup styles without using much texture or color.

On “Feel Beautiful,” Linda Chae, the infomercial pioneer who began starring in skin-care programs in 1987, offers inspirational makeup and hair-style techniques based on the subliminal communication of geometric shapes and specific colors. (Amethyst eye shadow, for instance, suggests a visionary; copper-lidded eyes, a flirt.) Chae developed her methodology, she says, after working for 20 years with individual clients.

On “The Makeover Magic Beauty Test,” Maron offers a bevy of his celebrity clients (from Jayne Kennedy and Mindy Cohn to Phyllis Diller and Mamie van Doren). Each is shown in before and after stages of makeup. The “under-makeup” system sold on Maron’s show is the most specialized of the three: camouflage cosmetics and techniques, particularly useful for illusionists who wish to conceal birthmarks, acne, fat cheeks or under-eye circles worthy of the Bride of Frankenstein.

Industry observers, as well as the principals behind each program, say that each of the three shows has been a financial success in the high-risk world of long-form TV commercials.

And Jackson’s “Beauty Breakthrough for the ‘90s,” hosted by actresses MacGraw and Lisa Hartman, has been a megahit. According to her producer, the program (which cost $750,000 to produce) has been pulling in sales of more than $1 million a week since it went on the air last October. Such sales are considered to be an extraordinary launch for a heretofore totally unknown cosmetics company.

“Half the world seems to have seen it. I get stopped about five times a day by people asking if the stuff is really good,” affirms MacGraw, who insists it is.

For all their popularity, the makeup infomercials are by no means the most dramatic on the air. Those honors are likely reserved for a hyperkinetic production featuring the hood of a Rolls-Royce going up in flames (to prove, on the spot, that its paint and finish have been safely protected with a sealant available through mail order) or the show in which fountain pen ink is blithely splattered all over a man’s shirt (to be instantly dissolved with a super stain remover).

But the comparatively relaxed and leisurely makeup presentations--occasionally livened up with pop music and MTV-style jump-cut editing--have suddenly lent glitz and credibility to the historically tacky medium of infomercials.

In fact, the current makeup shows are “some of the cleanest” in terms of honest claims, says Rader Hayes, an assistant professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin, who has been taping and writing about infomercials since 1985. (After being outlawed in the 1960s because the FCC wanted to restrict the amount of advertising on TV, program-length commercials were once again permitted in 1984 after the number of stations has vastly expanded.)

“None of (the three makeup programs) make any false claims or promises,” says Hayes. “There are other shows that are more questionable--the ones that get into the anti-aging and age reversal claims.”

Hayes even thinks that the new companies marketing makeup through infomercials may prove instructive for the cosmetic giants: “Other companies may see that they, too, can make money by making a quality product without making ridiculous, (medicinal) claims.”

She further suspects that more firms may attempt to market cosmetics through infomercials. When produced with integrity, she calls these vehicles “a consumer economist’s dream. They . . . explain all the product’s attributes and how to use it and the consumer sometimes gets a chance to know who’s behind the product, who developed it and to see if they believe in what they’re saying.”

What’s more, Hayes predicts that if the sales pace generated for cosmetics by infomercials continues, “the department stores are going to be hurt and any of the companies using in-home selling techniques are going to be hurt.”

Even some infomercial competitors have been impressed with the quality productions of the makeup programs.

“These three people (doing makeup shows) have all done their homework. They’ve all used chemists to develop their products. They’ve actually done makeups on people,” observes Richard Simmons, the ebullient health and fitness expert whose “Please Help Me Lose Weight” infomercial is said to be one of the best produced and most financially successful on the air. “There are good products on the air and then there’s crap that gives all of us a bad name,” adds Simmons, a former makeup artist who used to perform department-store makeup transformations before he got into the fitness business.

Maron compares spokesmen in infomercials with exaggerated claims to “snake oil salesmen of the old days.” Perhaps the most overwhelming facet of his decidedly non-oily infomercial is that so many Hollywood stars would agree to appear on camera without makeup or hair styling.

“No one was forced to be photographed without their makeup on,” says Maron, who for 10 years was a photographer known as the West Coast Scavullo before his best-selling book, “Michael Maron’s Makeover Magic,” and videotape of the same name hit the market in the mid-1980s.

“They were getting a free photo session and actors always need to update their photos,” continues the meticulous makeup artist with the classic anchorman looks. “We said, ‘You don’t have to sign a release until you see the photos.’ When they saw them, most felt they didn’t look as bad as they thought they would. But it still takes a special, very secure person who knows who they are to do this.”

Neither Los Angeles-based Maron nor his New York-based partner, David Funt, will disclose figures of sales from products sold through their infomercial on undermakeup techniques. “We’ve sold a ton of product,” allows Funt. “We didn’t have any major financing and now we’re a national cosmetic company, sold all over the country. And we were a company that to the world didn’t exist last August.”

Colorado’s Linda Chae similarly says she cannot reveal product sales, but she does note that her TV-advertised skin care line Chae Basics was publicly reported as doing $70.9 million in 1988 sales.

“The makeup line is doing much better than we expected, but we thought that makeup sight unseen would be difficult to market and that there was a stronger market in skin care products. The makeup line is profitable and generating more skin care sales,” says Chae, a beauty industry veteran who has run her own chain of skin care/makeup studios in Colorado and since 1983, has marketed her own line of naturally formulated makeup and skin care products.

Unlike Maron and Jackson, who pursued infomercial marketing directly, Chae wound up in the medium by accident--and starred in one of the first half-hour infomercials ever put on the air. “In the mid ‘80s I began meditating and knew I needed to make some serious marketing choices,” explains Chae, who changed her name from Linda Kay to Linda Chae at the suggestion of her partner/husband Frank Maggio. She didn’t want to be mistaken as a relation of cosmetics mogul Mary Kay of pink Cadillac fame.

“More than anything I wanted to be able to have direct one-on-one contact with my customers. I felt I could talk from my heart to their hearts. I thought I wanted to be in department stores,” she recalls.

“But you had to buy your way in, by promising to advertise and by staffing the counters. And you had to buy your customers by giving samples away. I just began to meditate and affirm that the most ideal marketing plan was going to be there. One day I got a call from this New York marketing company.”

The company was Synchronal, now the largest in the infomercial business. But, says the warm and radiant Chae, the firm wanted her to pitch a non-natural line of products. “I said, ‘I don’t believe in this line you’ve created. It has mineral oil and soap and things that I believe hurt the skin.”

She reformulated the products and Chae Basics was marketed on the air beginning in 1987. Its commercial is still appearing in some markets while Chae’s makeup presentation, the “Beauty Imaging System,” is airing in many more.

On both shows, Chae stresses the importance of inner as well as outer beauty and the result, she says, is that women in her taped seminars tend to get very emotional.

“When people get in touch with their inner beauty there’s all this joy. The producers had to edit out some of it. They thought all this emotion wasn’t real, but it is,” enthuses the petite, blond Chae.

Though no less passionate, Victoria Jackson is a far cooler breed of infomercializer. She and her “Beauty Breakthrough for the ‘90s” project smooth, ultra-high style. But Jackson, who taught professional makeup classes at UCLA extension for six years and whose makeup jobs have adorned countless magazine covers, is the first to admit that her path to seemingly sudden success was at times low and rocky.

“I wouldn’t lie and say it’s been easy and an overnight success,” she says, referring to the fact that she and her friend/spokesperson MacGraw (whom Jackson vaguely resembles) once teamed up in an ill-fated cosmetics venture. It failed, acknowledges Jackson, when the company they worked with didn’t live up to its financial agreements.

But, says Jackson, whose super sheer foundation has enjoyed popularity in the Hollywood community for years, “I knew I had great stuff and I was determined.”

Indeed, according to Steve Scott, producer of Jackson’s infomercial and videotape for Philadelphia-based American Telecast, there are now celebrities who endorse competing brands of cosmetics but who secretly order Jackson’s.

Scott is particularly excited by marketing surveys that have shown 73% of Jackson’s customers previously purchased their makeup from department stores (he says about 75% of cosmetics customers usually buy from drug or grocery stores) and that 90% of Jackson’s customers are under age 50, with 50% of her customers under age 36.

“We’re getting the piece of the market everybody wants,” he crows. “The up and coming younger people.”

Scott loves to release sales figures. “We did $800,000 the first week we were on the air, $1 million starting the second week and we’ve been averaging about a million a week since October,” he claims.

In April, those who wish to order Jackson cosmetics won’t have to scan their TV dials. Victoria Jackson Cosmetics will be the first infomercial firm to complement its televised presentation with a folio of magazine ads. Six pages of color ads, outlining Jackson’s products, are scheduled to appear in Cosmopolitan. Says Jackson of her potential customers: “They’ve seen the show. Here (with the ads), they can really study it.”

Meantime, she, Chae and Maron are all researching and creating their next infomercials and products, none of which they will presently discuss.

Says Maron, who could easily be speaking for all three of TV’s newest makeup mavens: “My new career is to be a teacher, motivator and communicator. Every day we have a new offer or project to develop or consider. It’s endless.”

For product information on Linda Chae’s “Feel Beautiful” infomercial and its airing dates and stations, call (800) 456-2423. Product information on Victoria Jackson’s “Beauty Breakthrough for the ‘90s” program is available at (800) V-MAKEUP. For Jackson air dates/stations information, call (800) 351-1500. For product information on Michael Maron’s “The Makeover Magic Beauty Test,” call (800) 356-1880; for Maron air dates and stations: (206) 448-2620.

REDGRAVE REMAKE

To even out what actress Lynn Redgrave calls her “red, blotchy skin,” makeup artist Michael Maron neutralized the red tones in her skin and then applied highlighter and contour creams to bring out bones and angles in her face. (Before and after photos courtesy of Michael Maron’s Makeover Magic Video.)