Wearing makeup is just as important for lady wrestlers in the ring as it is on the street or at a reception, probably even more so. The makeup needs to be appropriate and since women's pro wrestling is performance entertainment, just like theatre, makeup is used to tell a story. The villainess will wear appropriate makeup and so will the baby-face. Due to the nature of the sport, all wrestling makeup has to be flashy and sparkly and at least slightly exaggerated. It's all part of the "I can beat you and look good doing it" image that the very nature of the game calls for. Wrestling makeup can be fairly conventional (foundation, eyeliners, lipstick, fake eyelashes etc), or it can cross over into face-paint. Regardless of its complexity, it is always used to provide an additional dimension to the story conveyed by the wrestling match to the audience.

    Take the GLOW Girls' sparkly, glamorous makeup for instance. It is meant to convey the glamorous nature of one of the first all-female wrestling leagues. Face-paint was used by Malia Hosaka to tell a story as well: her kabuki-mask setup was meant to sell her Japanese angle. Face paint is also used to intimidate one's opponent, and if you take a look at the attached picture, of Malia Hosaka in her black face-paint, you'll understand why. Certainly, one of the most intimidating female wrestlers ever to wear face-paint was Luna Vachon.
What other roles does facepaint/makeup fulfill in women's wrestling besides intimidation and the selling of a certain image? In competitive ladies wrestling, it will hide the facial expression of the wearer, thus denying her opponent the possibility to gauge her victim's psychological state (in a submission hold for instance). Above and beyond everything though, wrestling face paint and make-up is just so darn cool. It expresses commitment to the sport and the spirit of a warrior. It shows that the wrestler wearing it is ready to go to any length in order to get into character and thus to best entertain her audience. To a certain degree, women's wrestling makeup fulfills the same role wrestling masks do in lucha libre: to hide the face of the wearer conferring her a new identity, one that may far outgrow the wrestler's actual persona in the eyes of the fans.

Several Japanese lady wrestlers wore face paint, as did some of the Mexican girls. Of the US ladies, besides Malia Hosaka and Sherri Martel, Luna Vachon, and the members of Bad Black and Beautiful also wore face-paint sometimes. As far a glamour-makeup goes, all the GLOW girls wore individual creations of art in their faces.