Serpentine, don't give up. We all started somewhere, nobody here was born knowing. What I suggest to you, though, is that you put this project aside for just a bit, and experiment with the shader options.

The material room is something AMAZING, I adore it with a passion, and that because I'm a terrible mathmatician (knowing good math helps a lot in making good shaders). Were I any good with numbers, I'd probably be shrieking in happiness all the time when working with materials ;) there's so much you can do, such detail.

Let's focus on the shine. Your Specular Value is set to zero and that would be fine if you had something plugged into Alternate Specular... As it's both Value zero and nothing in alternate, there's no way to have something shine in your shader. The purpose of putting a mask in Specular is to separate what should be the specular/shine in each part, but also if you don't want your skin to shine at all (skin does shine, but softly; I'd rather have no specular in skin than bad specular, and as you're starting in material room...), then black specular = no specular. You can use your mask to define that there's no specular in the skin part, and plug any "shine node" to the part of the Blender node that defines your white.

 

In that shader setting image you sent... Change Specular Value to 1, Unplug the texture from Input_2 (white) in your Blender_2 node (the one that's plugged to Specular_Color). Plug an Anisotropic node to your Input_2 in Blender_2. Render. Let's see. (You might want to change the Specular_Color to white without removing the node connected to it)

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Feel free to call me Ohki!

Poser Pro 11, Poser 12 and Poser 13, Windows 10, Superfly junkie. My units are milimeters.

Persephone (the computer): AMD Ryzen 9 5900x, RTX 3070 GPU, 96gb ram.