MAGA Melt: Mar-a-Lago Face is Evolving

I think we all had the same reaction when we saw Susan Dell. The wife of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell made an appearance alongside Donald Trump at the White House earlier this month, and the news went viral not for their dealings but for her look. She looked noticeably different from her earlier years: far thinner, with unnaturally wide eyes and hyper-dark make-up around them, and disproportionate features, exaggerated all the more by her big hair and shoulder padded dress. Around the same time, a portrait of Barbera Thornhill, an interior designer turned ambassador-at-large for the Trump administration, was revealed to the public. Thornhill, who is in her late-70s, was also the subject of comments about her appearance, particularly her tightly-pulled face, widened eyes, and laminated, uneven brows.

Why is my daughter and her friends dressing up like Susan Dell tomorrow for homecoming week???? 🙃🙃🫠🫠 should I be proud or sad?

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— Shana V. White (she/her) (@shanavwhite.blacksky.app) October 21, 2026 at 11:38 PM

Callista Gingrich welcomes Ambassador Barbera Thornhill, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, to the U.S. Embassy in Bern

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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) October 15, 2026 at 7:24 PM

The response to these women was so immediate, both cruel and just kind of baffled. Even Meghan McCain, due her “stopped clock” moment of the year, was driven to tweet, “Republicans really need to elevate and highlight more women in our party who have NOT had bizarre or botched plastic surgery that is both distracting and made a mockery all over the internet.” Was this Mar-a-Lago Face or something even worse?

We’ve become all too used to seeing people, particularly women, in the orbit of the orange one evolving into a homogenous figure of intense bronzer and misaligned fillers. Mar-a-Lago Face was suddenly so prevalent that it earned a catchy nickname and a sea of think-pieces to boot (including my own, shameless plug.) It was defined by a combination of harsh make-up—contouring, thick black eyeliner—and obvious surgery or injectables, particularly lip fillers and Botox. This exaggeration of femininity is typically coupled with sleek dresses, big hair and lashes, and expensive jewellery. With men, the look is more about a kind of macho agelessness: t-shots and Botox, but with manicured brows that wouldn’t look out of place in a drag show. It’s a parodic version of the already ludicrous gender binary. There is a reason that conservatives have tried to make “blue haired liberals” their favourite insult, and a direct response to Mar-a-Lago Face jokes: one style represents freedom, the other compliance.

But Thornhill and Dell aren’t neat fits for this mould. This trend didn’t seem like Mar-a-Lago Face as we knew it. This was a throwback to the wobbly plastic surgeries of old, when your favourite stars of the ’90s disappeared for a few weeks and suddenly turned up on a red carpet unable to blink. The asymmetry looked uncomfortable and did not conceal the women’s age, although they certainly didn’t look as one would expect people in their 70s to appear. I was reminded of Jocelyn Wildenstein, the late socialite who notoriously had so much work done that she was barely able to blink. All those surgeries made her simultaneously a star and a cautionary tale.

I’ve heard it said several times that the conspicuousness of the surgery is the point for these mega-rich people. What better symbol of your ability to waste money than to wear it on your face in the most unignorable manner possible? In The Hunger Games, the residents of the Capitol undergo increasingly grotesque surgeries as a power play, not unlike how the kings and queens of old prized themselves on their soft pale hands as a sign of their high living. Being human is so common, after all.

Dr. Terry Dubrow, the plastic surgeon who is on every reality TV show about unethical makeovers, told Vanity Fair that the obviousness of the aesthetic was on purpose. “I’m so successful. Everyone around me is successful. We do things to the extreme. We’re excessively rich. We’re excessively powerful,” he says, mimicking the mentality of the clients who request this look. “If I’m going to have a facelift, I don’t want any laxity. If I’m going to have a brow lift, I want to have a brow lift; I want it up. [If] I’m going to have [an] upper-eye lift, take all the skin.”

Really, though, botched surgeries are as common as blue skies. Great work is meant to be subtle enough to offer plausible deniability to the patient, or it’s such a masterful display of reversing the clock that renewed youthfulness seems like an act of God. Consider Kris Jenner’s facelift, rumoured to have cost $100,000. She could never deny that she’d had work done and that wasn’t the point: The opportunity to brag about the inaccessibility of such stellar surgery was. Work of this quality is available, but it is seldom necessary. It feels like it is when you’re amid a sea of people—friends, husbands, colleagues, agents, social media trolls—telling you to stop looking so old and tired at the grand old age of 35. It’s how we’ve ended up with so many beloved actors getting more and more subtle tweaks until we suddenly realized they had a new, unmovable face uncannily different from their old one.

Mar-a-Lago Face is about conservative conformity and hyper-feminised submission to power, but it’s also about bragging rights, much like the old-school ways of facelifts pulled so tight that you smile like the Joker. In a world of extreme politics, where you’re surrounded by back-stabbers and are pandering to an overgrown toddler with a shoddy hair transplant, the impetus is to go big. More fillers, fewer wrinkles, yank that skin back until your ears are on your neck. With the more-is-more approach, the risks are greater, if not inevitable.

Eventually, you have to make the call: do you want to look old or weird? Sure, fillers and a few nips and tucks can erase some wrinkles, but sooner or later, you will go too far and your quest for youth will fail. You’ll just look like an old person who’s had bad surgery. The skin can only take so much, and we’ve yet to advance to the point in medical science where you can just grow more. Still, if the other option is looking like everyone else, you can see why rich people panic and decide to sacrifice all that upper eye skin.