Here’s how you start: you take your head down to the studs. Facelift, little nose job, full veneers on those filed-down teeth, filler in the lips, filler in the cheeks, inject enough Botox that you reduce your ability to interpret emotional stimuli and thus find yourself less empathic, phew.
You’re going to want to get a doctor with a very sharp knife and pay them to dig the beauty kicking and screaming deep from the guts of you, you’re going to want to mould, skim and smooth that face to the texture of clingfilm on raw chicken.
Then hair! Bleach it blonde (brunette accepted at certain wealth brackets), extensions down to here, blow-out to here. Once dried, relax beneath a cooling spray of fake tan. Let it caress and contour your bare conservative flesh, let the girl’s fine mist detail the areas of your body implicated when rolling back reproductive rights.
And on to the make-up. Foundation, thick; concealer, white. Brows, more brows. Bit more brow. Brown lipliner, beige lipstick, black eyeliner, mascara, mascara, matte bronzer, mascara, pink blusher, and there you are. This is your answer to what a woman is: a woman is someone who suffers for their beauty.
I have come round, I think, to the Mar-a-Lago face. I’ve come right round — I no longer find the excess and signposting (this is a lady’s sweet sweet smile! This is the healthy skin of a fertile woman!) cartoonish or confusing, no, quite the opposite, I find it refreshing. While the men of the right are spending their money trying to live forever, the women are simply trying to embalm themselves early.
And while a vast number of us, all across the political spectrum, are nipple-deep in the project of beauty and spending far more than we can each afford of both our cash and attention on prickly experiences that feign the appearance of youth, that slow the hell of hair, the brute force of the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic feels in many ways more honest than the shrouded efforts that my people on the left tend to lean towards.
I’m talking about the cosmetic procedures aimed to “enhance” rather than “transform”, and the expensive skincare products designed to give women a “natural” glow and gently “blur” imperfections rather than cover them up, worn with, for example, individual lash extensions and tinted moisturiser, and performed with casual, demure superiority.
Sure, it was a little grotesque the way Lauren Sanchez (now, I guess, the wealthiest astronaut in the world) gushed about the efficacy of her lash extensions when discussing her upcoming visit to space, and the way Katy Perry yearned for a team of hairdressers to join them in the capsule (“If I could take glam up with me, I would do that!”) but also … yes? Also — yes, why not curl your hair while the planet’s melting? If beauty is a shield, a distraction, a performance, then why not give yourself the full body-horror treatment when nothing else bears looking at?
And amid the grand grotesquerie of space tourism, a pissing contest for billionaires with its pollutants and debris and the way it works to deepen inequalities down on earth, why not paint your face pink and gold while you’re up there? Why not put on a show?
Yesterday, I sat on the floor of the bathroom with my makeup bag and gave myself a conservative face. It was remarkably soothing, as night fell, a magazine version of self-care. With my fingers I blended in two layers of foundation a shade too dark that I bought at the end of summer when blinded by tan dysphoria. I used a sharpened pencil to shade in my eyebrows and a similar one to draw in a mouth. I softened black kohl around my eyes and applied three coats of mascara.
I looked in the mirror. The layers of face powder gave me a sort of undead quality, not unpleasant, and the bronzer below my cheekbones made me look like there was something I was dying to say about you once you’d left the room.
There in the glass was a woman who had opinions about the 15-minute city, and the overdiagnosis of children with ADHD, and disability benefits and winter fuel payments and who should cook dinner tonight. I felt a kind of rough power shudder through me, and smiled, and the makeup around my mouth cracked a little.
When gazing on the two faces of wealth today, the “natural” on the left, and the caricatured on the right, there is relief for me in being able to see the latter’s workings.
There’s some mean pleasure, too, in seeing the message the owners of a Mar-a-Lago face think they’re sending is being undermined and complicated by the medium. These women are expressing their conservative gender politics by dressing up as ultra-femme women and, in doing so, deftly unpick the lie they often tell, which is that femininity is innate.
If it was, it would surely not require all this — the injectables, the lipstick, the dye, or indeed the surgery, which some might call gender-affirming care. It’s drag, with all the campery and inauthenticity that implies. And for that reason, I’m in.
