Groomer polishes male celebs.

• Author: Shapiro, Bee
• Position: Living

Byline: Bee Shapiro

When the nine-time Emmy nominee and widely acknowledged dreamboat Jon Hamm sails down the red carpet on Sunday, chances are you will notice his date's dress, makeup and hairstyle more than the particulars of his appearance.

But Hamm will have had his hair carefully styled to look looser than the tightly combed businessman's coif for which he's known on "Mad Men.''

"I work with Jon when he's Jon Hamm,'' said his groomer, Diana Schmidtke. "I don't work with Don Draper. So for me it's always about making him not look too Don Draper. Almost like he just ran his fingers through his hair. Very natural.''

Though some men, famous or not, have been boldly stepping out with "guyliner'' and nail polish, we are not quite at the point where Hollywood makeup artists are taking credit for it as they do with women.

Schmidtke, 38, is one of a handful of male celebrity groomers, a term little heard of 15 years ago (when, she said, photographers would ask her, "What is that, like dog grooming?'') but increasingly bandied about in a world of high-definition cameras and metrosexuality. She has tended to the floppy forelocks and five o'clock shadows of not just Hamm but Clint Eastwood, George Clooney, Jimmy Fallon, Viggo Mortensen and Chris Hemsworth, making sure they look like the best versions of themselves for magazine covers, press junkets and award shows.

This summer, Schmidtke was in New Mexico, working on her first film, the comedy "A Million Ways to Die in the West,'' directed by and starring Seth MacFarlane, whom she started working with two years ago and groomed for the Academy Awards in February.

Reviews of MacFarlane's Oscars hosting stint were mixed, but thanks to the Peter Thomas Roth anti-shine gel Schmidtke smeared on his T-zone, no one could say he was shiny. On a typical celebrity booking, Schmidtke starts with an old-fashioned barber shave. Next come the eyebrows, a potential minefield. "The quickest way to feminize a man's face is to over-groom the eyebrow,'' she said. "You can do above the brow, but when you start to take too much underneath or create any type of arch, boom, he starts to look like a girl.'' She prefers plucking the brow to waxing, which she said removes too much, and also uses tweezers to tackle stray nose and ear hairs.

Then she applies concealer (no Pan-Cake, please!) and mattifying lotion -- more guy-friendly than powder puffs, she said -- as needed.

In fact, Schmidtke is sensitive to all sorts of...