Other than bad teeth or bad skin, nothing has a more negative affect on your headshot than red eyes. The good news is, that unlike teeth and skin, you have a better chance to sort out red eyes on your own. So for this episode, we are going to touch on what you can do to minimize this effect.

Get more sleep – this should be a no-brainer for most of us, but honestly, is not something that any of us adhere to. With so much technology at our fingertips, and our brains being slowly hardwired to do more in less time, it only makes sense that we to find ourselves stay awake a whole lot longer than we normally should. Start breaking the habit of looking at your smart phone, watching a TV, look at your computer screen, or any distraction that keeps you from getting sufficient sleep.

Cut down on alcohol consumption – now, I know this is going to be hard for a lot of folks that are drinkers, but if you're serious about building your career as an actor, you need to do the things that are going to help propel you, and get you noticed by casting, and, talent agents.

The drinking alcohol situation though can be a little complicated; if you have a problem with drinking, then by all means seek medical advice as soon as possible. Actually as I think about it, even if you're a social drinker, or, you think your social drinker, go talk to a doctor anyway, and see if your drinking might be causing you problems with your vision.

Stop rubbing your eyes for Pete's sake – yes I know this is a hard one, it's something that we've done most of our lives at some point or another. But this is without question one of the worst things we can do when it comes to dealing with the eyes.

If you find your eyes itchy or scratchy, even if you have your eyelids close and you rub on your eyelids, all that happens is your putting undue pressure on your eyeballs which creates swelling in the blood vessels, which ultimately leads to you looking like 28 days later. Curb that shit right now, and don't let me have to tell you that again.

Invest in eyewash – eyewash is pretty useful stuff especially if you're working in dusty environments. It doesn't take that much time, and the best part of it all, is that it has a very soothing effect on your eyes. Basically fill up the cup with the solution, place the cup over each eye, open your eye and turn eyeball around in the solution, rinse and repeat with other eye.

More often than not, whatever particulates are floating on your eyes, will be rinsed off, and you'll find relief.

Drink more water – it amazes and shocks me how little water we carbon-based life forms consume. Under guidelines recommended by medical associations 15 8oz cups are the ideal. And when we talking about 15 cups of water, we're talking about pure water; not those power drinks, fruit juices, sodas, or anything else that has water in it.

Granted these can help meet that quota, but drinking your water throughout the course of your day is going to do significantly better for you than any of those combined. Hydration is what we looking for here, and when your body is properly hydrated, it has a corrective effect on how your eyes look. So instead of them looking pinkish or red, they will look very white.

Skip the Visine and switch to liquid tears – the idea is to lubricate the eyes not false medicate them. Using Visine can cause addiction to the product, however the continuous use eventually makes the eyes more resistant to the active ingredients, and you need more and more to get a positive result, which of course results in diminishing returns.

Liquid tears on the other hand, only uses ingredients to lubricate and not medicate the eyes, which means you can use it over and over with out fear of your eyes resisting the treatment.

Use cold compresses – cold compress helps shrink or constrict the blood vessels in the eye so that they are less noticeable. Next to drinking water, this is one of the easiest solutions, as all you really need is a nice damp rag that was dipped in cold or even icy water, ring out the excess water, fold the rag,  place over your eyes, and let it sit there for anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes.

You'll know it's working when you can feel the coolness getting to your  eyeballs, and you'll deftly notice that it's working after 15 minutes when you look in the mirror and noticed that your eyes look more white.

Use a combination of the above – so this workflow is pretty simple; you drink your water on a regular basis, place a couple of drops of liquid tears in each eye, close the eyes and pinched the the base between the eyes he knows and movie eyes around, and then with your eyes closed just place the cold compress over the eyes and let sit for about 5 to 15 minutes.

In my personal experience, this is one of the best solutions for combating red or pinkish eyes. Ideally, do this a few times in the week before you do your shoot so you get the best out of the treatment, and maximize how your headshots look.

If by chance, you're trying these simple methods and you're not making headway, then your next step should be to go see your doctor. The redness may be an indication of something more serious, and may result in loss of your eyesight. And we don't want to see that (no pun intended).

Your head shots are all about you on your best day, appearance wise. Don't mess up potentially great images by not taking the simple steps to improve how your eyes look. Trust me when I say, your images will come back to a lot sooner when there is less post-production work that has to be done, especially when it comes to cleaning up the eyes.