Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | October 2, 2025
Everyone has had work done. That’s the promise of celebrity life. No matter how famous you are or how much your image is dependent on naturalness or relatability, the odds are high that your forehead is unmoving and your jawline non-sagging. The general public has never been more aware of how prevalent surgeries and fillers are, and they’ve never been more accessible or advertised to the masses. It’s the biggest open secret that has become a mundane part of life for the perennially online. Hell, my local shopping centre has a place offering fillers right next door to the smoothie shop. As the prevalence of such treatments grows, so does the societal pressure for everyone, regardless of finances or visibility, to keep up with the trend. The ever-stifling demands of modern beauty standards shift but remain restrictive. For women, in particular, it gets worse, inching ever closer to caricature. So, it’s no real surprise that the prevailing beauty trend of our current era is one of parodic femininity and conservative patriarchal rule. And it’s ugly as hell.
We’ve all seen the look: The over-inflated lips, the heavy tanning and one-tone hair dyes, the obvious fillers and Botox that reshape the face into something curiously boxy, and makeup of broad strokes and dark colours. Scalpels may or may not have been involved, but it’s clear that a lot of time, work, and money went into creating this look, one that can only be described as ‘too much.’
It’s Mar-a-Lago Face, and it’s taken over the Trump Administration. Consider Kristi Noem, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Laura Loomer, Melania Trump, Lauren Boebert, and Karoline Leavitt. It’s not exclusive to Trumpites (see Lauren Sanchez Bezos) or women (Matt Gaetz’s Joker brows), but it has become representative of a certain kind of public figure. This is an exaggeration of femininity shaped in the bowels of conservatism, reality TV, and the male gaze. To put it bluntly, it’s a face that has become indicative of a woman we believe deserves to wear it.
Cosmetic augmentations have gotten subtler over the years, although there’s still a wide range of differences in terms of work and execution. Think of how everyone seemed truly stunned after Kris Jenner’s most recent facelift because it seemed simultaneously natural enough and miraculous in its results. Injectables were sold as the less invasive and more organic-looking alternative to full-on surgery, but their results are unreliable. Filler can migrate from its intended placements. You can grow blind to its continued efficacy and get more and more done until it’s lumpy and out of balance. A lot of people have gotten fillers at too young an age, with the promise of ‘preventative anti-wrinkle’ powers, and been left with an ageing visage. All those subtle tweaks eventually add up to a blatant final portrait if you’re not careful. And Mar-a-Lago Face is the antithesis of care.
It’s not just for conservative creeps, though. Mar-a-Lago Face is like the bastard cousin of Instagram Face, the cursed aestheticizing of femininity that took over social media in the past five or so years. Jia Tolentino, writing for The New Yorker, described the ideal Instagram Face as that of a ‘sexy baby tiger’: exoticized but undeniably white, sharp cheekbones and jawline, plump lips, fox eyes, and contour-mandatory shaping.
The Kardashians were seen as the most representative figures of Instagram Face, thanks to their ever-refining features that only seemed to look good under the myriad filters of the social media platform. Through their changing faces and bodies, which are simultaneously trend-chasing and paradigm-shifting, we saw how women were ‘meant’ to look. We also saw the stifling contradictions of this endless grind of self-maintenance. You have to keep getting more and more procedures to keep up the façade of agelessness, but the more fillers you get, the more it ages you. It’s turned all of our faces into single-use plastic of the flesh. Buccal fat is cut out, implants are shoved in. Our own bodies are fads to be obsessed over and then discarded.
There is a kind of brutal honesty about Mar-a-Lago Face that I almost admire. It’s so obvious that you can’t deny it, unlike hordes of Hollywood stars who are frozen in time and continue to shill their skincare brands as the magic behind it. Frankly, there are a handful of actors whom I can no longer take seriously in movies because their work has taken over their ability to emote, and a number of performers I love are heading in that direction as the facelift returns to prominence (no, it’s not just a tight ponytail, guys.) With women like Noem, Loomer, Guilfoyle, and many a Trump, they are the evidence of it all, plain as the shaven-down noses on their faces.
It’s always treacherous territory to publicly critique a woman’s appearance. How does one do it without being misogynistic or perpetuating needless demands over our bodily autonomy? It’s your face, so do as you please, right? But I think it’s impossible to talk about the aesthetics of fascism in the Trump era without dissecting Mar-a-Lago Face. This is a government desperate to exert control over women’s rights and eliminate trans visibility in all its forms, and they’ve done it via women who have moulded their faces into parodies of themselves that demand an archaic binary of gender as the norm. They’ve paid exorbitant amounts of money for gender-affirming care, all while trying to strip others of it. They push harmful anti-science conspiracies surrounding vaccines while their own faces are weighed down by injectables.
Trumpist misogyny is an incongruent blend of tradwife propaganda and bellowing faux girlbosses in red baseball caps. It pushes total subservience to men, even though its messaging is reliant on women who never fully embraced that lifestyle. You have to be ‘hot’ like a ’90s Playboy model (dark hair preferable) or Miss USA contestant. The dresses must be low-cut and tight. You have to loathe any kind of deviance from the smothering norm that can only be enforced through sheer brute law. Any objection to that is smeared as ‘woke’ or used as evidence for a transvestigation (not that any of these Mar-a-Lago Face owners have been exempt from such transphobia).
It’s not exclusively in service of Trump’s own fetish for body-policing, although that is part of the labour. Remember, this is a man who is obsessed with judging celebrities’ appearances and has had so much work done himself (see also Elon Musk). Men like Matt Gaetz get the same work done to reshape themselves as more masculine, with sharper jaws and He-Man musculature (although it’s worth noting that there doesn’t seem to have been as major a push for men to Mar-a-Lago themselves compared to women, because the ‘master race’ gets to look as inbred as possible and still assert themselves as superior). It’s bigotry as drag, a reinforcement of gender and race via unnatural means in the name of tacky eugenics.
It’s all fake, an artificial assertion of authenticity from a political ideal based on shaky foundations. They live in the world of fake news, where the mirrors were taken straight from the carnival fun maze. It’s an influential mindset that has permeated many areas of culture, even those that do not see themselves as MAGA. Kim Kardashian’s gone back to being skinny and dropped the appropriation of Black womanhood (except for a durag here and there) to sell shapewear to corporations and hang out with Ivanka Trump. Lauren Sanchez wore a bra and blazer to the inauguration before embracing full Temu Grace Kelly princess-dom for her Vogue-endorsed wedding. Every time a progressive movement makes a step forward in society, it’s almost immediately crushed by a return to conservatism and misogyny, and it’s usually wrapped up in corporate buzzwords and marketing.
At its heart, Mar-a-Lago Face is a symbol of a push to restore a social order where women are second-class citizens. Most beauty trends pushed by the mainstream aren’t exactly rallying cries for feminist autonomy, mind you, but this one is notable for its political agenda. But it is a trend. Eventually, all of these women will notice how their brand has fallen out of favour and rush to the part-time filler working out of a dentist’s office in a strip mall. They’ll move on to something else, and I’m sure they’ll try to commodify that too. It’ll probably be the ‘natural’ look, another con as artificial as Melania’s forehead. Personally, I’m rooting for the full Donald orange. Go on, Kim, embrace the tangerine tint.
