NYT Guest Opinion "Rich People Didn't Look Like This Before" [View all]

If you spend enough time around the very rich these days, it’s clear. People didn’t use to look like this because people naturally can’t look like this.

Models in a Paris Fashion Week show for the luxury brand Matières Fécales last month caricatured the 1 percent by wearing prosthetics that resembled post-op faces, including grotesque under-eye bulges, skin pulled up from their temples and lips that appeared unnaturally inflated and stitched at the edges. South Park depicted Kristi Noem with a face so Botoxed it melts off and scurries away. From the Met Gala to the Oscars and every red carpet in between, these rich faces are everywhere.

A “rich face” is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions and plumped with filler or implants or a person’s own grafted fat. Once, this face belonged to a villainous class of elites in sci-fi depictions of a dystopian future. In “The Hunger Games,” residents of the capital city who revel in luxury and excess at the expense of other impoverished districts often wear sculpted, altered faces. In “Dr. Who,” a wealthy socialite from the distant future has gone through so many face-lifts that she becomes little more than a stretched face on a thin sheet of skin mounted on a frame, maintained with constant moisturizer.

The ultrawealthy seem less and less concerned with hiding their excesses. They’re richer than ever, and figures like Lauren Sánchez Bezos and President Trump give them permission to flaunt their neo-Gilded Age spoils. After all, the unspoken appeal of cosmetic work is that it’s not just about looking “better” or “fixing” something or trying to remain competitive in ageist workplaces. It’s about indulging in a particular kind of experiential self-care that is infinitely customizable and accessible to only a select group. It signifies extreme wealth and belonging to an elite, all-powerful clique that gets to operate under a different set of societal norms and rules.

More at link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/plastic-surgery-rich-face.html