It's a much worse version of Skin Wars.

dan_da_man-60288

It's really mediocre as a competition show. Skin Wars was successful because it showed us really unique and interesting artwork, Glow Up follows it up by showing us someone who can make a lip shiny.

They cannot settle on whether they want good make-up or art. Some people do full pictures on people's faces and get told "Wow, we love it, it's so creative," someone does the same thing a few weeks later and get "It's too artistic, it's a painting not make-up" and get eliminated.

The host was bland. Her entire job was to tell people to enter and leave the room, and she even managed to make that seem more dull than it was.

The judges are legitimately terrible. I don't know who this harpy is who keeps yelling, but seriously; "Ding Dong!" doesn't mean 'you did well,' stop yelling it 4 times an episode. Ding dong is not a thing, ding dong will never be a thing. The only time 'ding dong' will be appropriate is when the townsfolk sing about a house falling on her. The male judge was completely forgettable, and let's be frank here, of all the people who should be judging a beauty competition, it shouldn't be the dude rocking waxed curlicues in his moustache.

The actual structure was pretty bad. One challenge puts 2 people "at risk" of going into the faceoff, but that's meaningless as it's the challenge 2 results that determine who goes into the faceoff. They realised this about halfway through the season and actually gave a penalty to the challenge 1 losers of 15 minutes less time in challenge 2. The faceoff is a 5 minute challenge to do one aspect of make up on someone. They blatantly designed them to favour certain individuals though, as when someone who failed 2 challenges based on lack of creativity ended up in one, the challenge was suddenly "we don't care about creativity only technical skill," then inversely other contestants would face "this is all about spontaneity over actual results!"

The winner was a massive letdown, as they just slapped a rainbow on a face 8 episodes in a row and were told they were amazingly creative for it, while the best competitor was eliminated the episode before for no reason, and the best person in the finals honestly screwed themselves over with a bad design and didn't make it to the last challenge.

Hope they get their wits about them and cancel this before it makes it to a season two.

score 1/10

dan_da_man-60288 11 December 2019

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5313914/