What is MAGA Face? And I Just Microneedled!

All the gross details with pictures

Close your eyes and picture a woman. Barrel curls sprayed into an unholy helmet. Eyelashes long enough to paddle a canoe. Lips so plumped they cast their own shadow. Now open your eyes and tell me: Is she a Real Housewife or a Republican politician?

This is a look. It’s a brand! And it also might just be a political strategy. If you’ve been watching the rise of women like Kristi Noem, Nancy Mace, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, you’ve seen it: what journalist Jessica Grose calls “MAGA Beauty,” and what Mother Jones’ Inae Oh has dubbed “Mar-a-Lago Face.” A hyper-feminized, algorithm-approved, pageant-adjacent uniform of power.

This week on the podcast, I talked to Jess and Inae about how this look has taken over the right wing and why it matters.

It’s not just about foundation and fillers. This is about how political power gets gendered, packaged, and sold and how the modern far-right has managed to combine traditional gender roles with a hyper-glamorous TV-ready femininity in a way that’s both confusing and terrifying.

Inae describes the look really well in her MJ piece.

But the most jarring aesthetic in this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is the unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectables like Botox and fillers. (As one Daily Mail headline declared, “Plastic surgery was [the] star of [the] show” at the Republican National Convention in 2024.) The overall look has since been disparagingly referred to as “Mar-a-Lago face.”

Although plastic surgery and injectables are enjoyed far beyond conservative circles, what distinguishes Mar-a-Lago face from what you and I might contemplate getting done on an especially self-flagellating day is the aggressive, overt nature with which MAGA-ites seem to pursue it. “Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon I spoke with described it.

“What we’re seeing with something like Mar-a-Lago face is a swing back toward [an era of plastic surgery when] people can tell that people have had work done,” Alka Menon, a professor of sociology at Yale University, told me.

This look is about being seen by the algorithm and by Donald Trump. Because I think our current president may only be able to compute a woman’s face if it is a plasticized performance of womanhood. It’s drag-adjacent, yet anti-drag. Plastic surgery-forward, yet anti-choice. Feminine-coded, yet deeply anti-feminist.

It’s contradiction wrapped in contour. And it is nothing new. It is a look designed to go viral on social media. As Jess wrote in her awesome Times piece.

Their look is an extreme and specific version of a million other interchangeable influencers. As my newsroom colleague Sandra Garcia noted, “Lifestyle influencers exist in an ecosystem that prizes homogeneity,” because social media algorithms reward it. These algorithms also reward rage baiting, or the deliberate posting of negative content to create more engagement and more clicks.

Influencing has become a form of female power that is acceptable within conservative communities because it does not threaten the status quo, where women are ultimately subordinate and ornamental.

None of this is about what any one woman chooses to do with her face. Botox, filler, lashes. I’ve done them all. I am literally writing this with numbing cream on my face getting ready to get microneedled.

I feel like this is more about women being pressured to look exactly the same in order to access power and I think that is something we should be talking about so let’s keep the conversation going.

And amidst this conversation I am getting my own face ready for book tour. I know that I am going to be on TV a bunch promoting Everyone is Lying to You. I am going to be at events and on stages and in lots of social media. So here we go!

This week I am trying microneedling with plasma. That means they numb my face, smear it with my own blood and then stick it with a bunch of tiny needles in an attempt to stimulate collagen, or as I prefer to say, to make my cheeks look more like my baby’s butt. Here’s how it all went down.

Don’t forget to grab your copy of Everyone is Lying to You. You can send me your receipt at the link below for a free one year subscription to this newsletter. This is a list of purchasing options, but it is also available at a lot of indie bookstores and you can get signed copies mailed to you here and here. Tour stops are here!