At Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, his inner sanctum gathered in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Among the guests were Melania Trump, Kristi Noem (the Homeland Security Secretary), and Lauren Sanchez (wife of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos). As they stood meters from each other, it was hard not to notice the similarities. The women gleamed like the polished marble around them, their appearances unmistakably sculpted by the hands of modern cosmetic science. They’re not the only examples of a certain pinched look among the upper echelons of America’s right wing. In fact, the plastic surgery trend has become so prevalent that it has earned a nickname: Mar-a-Lago face.
Coined after Trump’s famous Palm Beach resort — where the president spends much of his time in Florida golfing — the look is defined by nose jobs, face lifts, and an unholy amount of injectables. “It’s the tiny little pixie nose and big lips,” Dr. Faryan Jalalabadi, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, tells The Independent. “The opposite of a natural face in which there’s a delicate balance of proportions.” It’s all in the narrow eyes and elongated smile. It’s Nicole Kidman, post-Stepford Wives. But as Dr. Giselle Prado-Wright, a cosmetic surgeon in Fort Myers, Florida, explains, it’s not just in the “really tight, high cheekbone” but in the fact that the face is “a little bit overfilled.”
People have been turning to plastic surgery in the hope of maintaining their youthfulness ever since the 1930s, when procedures were first coming into fashion. The tactics were invasive at the time, focusing mainly on the skin as opposed to the facial muscles, resulting in a more pulled visage and restricted expression. Think Joan Van Ark, Priscilla Presley, and Joan Rivers.
Moving into the 1980s, surgeons began to discover new methods that manipulated ligaments and reshaped the skin and the muscles to form more natural looks. By the turn of the 21st century, professionals had figured out how to use fillers and injectables to give faces a rejuvenated look and mimic facelifts without going under the knife. And yet, with all the new technology, there were stars in reality shows like the Real Housewives franchise sporting stretched features as if they had gotten a facelift decades prior. Melania and her female conservative posse are flaunting similar looks today.
“Aesthetic trends evolve based on cultural, social, and even regional influences,” Melinda Anna Farina, top global aesthetics consultant and founder of Beauty Brokers, explains. “ The community that you’re in, you tend to fall into the standards and trends of that community,” Dr. Jalalabadi agrees. “So if everyone at your country club is starting to look a certain way, you may have this thing in the back of your mind saying, ‘Well, I should probably look like that too.’ This may not be the best thing, but it’s the reality. It just takes one person to change their face in a certain way, and then you have two people following a certain trend or a certain look, and then it can just spread like wildfire.”
However, Farina doesn’t believe women are attracted to the Mar-a-Lago face aesthetic based purely on their political leaning. She says it’s “more of the structural face of Eastern European women” catching the public’s eye. Dr. Prado-Wright adds that, beyond politics, these are women in the public eye, subject to intense scrutiny — not only from themselves but from millions of others as well.
Plastic surgery is typical for a lot of famous female figures due to the oppressive beauty standards they’re held to. Perhaps it’s telling that one of the surprise breakouts on screen this past year was Demi Moore in The Substance. It showed her character, Elisabeth Sparkle, grapple with the reality of aging in the entertainment industry by taking increasingly devastating measures to restore her youthful image. “Women in politics and the public eye face a unique level of scrutiny when it comes to their appearance,” Farina explains. “Unlike their male counterparts, their looks are often dissected in a way that can overshadow their achievements. As a result, some women choose aesthetic enhancements not necessarily to chase trends, but to maintain a refreshed, confident presence in high-visibility roles.”
Ironically, the rise of Mar-a-Lago face coincides with a growing trend among left-wing A-listers like Kristin Davis and Courteney Cox to dissolve their fillers for a more natural look, alongside increasing demand for less invasive, minimalist procedures. And yet, the women who fit the Mar-a-Lago face mold are doing the opposite and exhibiting what Dr. Jalalabadi likes to call “frozen face,” which is most likely caused by filler obstructing the muscles, and results in less emotive expressions; researchers have found this leads to a lack of ability to connect with others. This has real-world implications. “When you look at them and you’re trying to have a heart-to-heart conversation with this person, it’s hard not to get distracted,” Dr. Jalalabadi notes. “You have a hard time connecting with this person because they can’t move their face.”
This is not to say all women with Mar-a-Lago face intend to appear as reconstructed as they do. In fact, the implications of past procedures could be the reason they’ve gone so far. “ What we saw a few years back is that people were heavily relying on minimally invasive rejuvenation techniques,” Dr. Jalalabadi explains. “This typically lent itself to quick med spa visits where an injector would basically mask shadows and signs of aging with dermal fillers like hyaluronic acid. It was a quick, easy, and cheap way to kind of help soften shadows. Also, with that same volumizing injection, people could build sculpted cheekbones.”
Dr. Jalalabadi says this type of cosmetic work is not the “anatomically true way to do these things.” “When we age, our face not only loses a little bit of volume, but really, tissue becomes lax and kind of falls down. So, people think that they can lift tissue, but the only way to lift it with volume is to overfill. [Then] we see these overfilled high cheekbones, puffy-looking faces, bordering on non-human looks, because what happens is people keep going back for little maintenance touch-ups, trying to keep up with these high cheekbones and soft shadows,” Dr. Jalalabadi continues. “But unfortunately, they’ve now stretched all their tissue and they kind of accelerated the aging of their face with things like the Joker smile, where your lips are pulled too horizontally, or you get windswept eyes because the skin wasn’t set in a proper direction.”
A surgeon’s mistakes may be to blame, but these women are still making the conscious decision to continue to feed their faces with filler when they could let it be or dissolve it. “ Too much of a good thing is definitely a terrible thing,” says Dr. Jalalabadi. “This is an example of people trying to have good intentions in treating their beauty and aging, which can be done tastefully in a very human way. We’ve just kind of derailed in [doing] that. But look, this is America, the land of the free — if someone truly wants to look that way, then let them.”
