Rich People Didn’t Used to Look Like This

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Guest Essay

Rich People Didn’t Used to Look Like This

April 30, 2026,

5:02 a.m. ET

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Lola Dupre

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By

Amy Odell

Ms. Odell is the author of the

Back Row newsletter

and “

Anna: The Biography

.”

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If you spend enough time around the very rich these days, it’s clear. People didn’t used 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.

Status signaling used to be the purview of the $18,000 cocktail dress or the $50,000 designer bag. Now, the small number of Very Important Clients who account for 40 percent of luxury sales seems to be shifting more of their highly desired dollars to their faces. Today’s cleverly marketed aesthetic treatments include “global facial micro-optimization,” which involves numerous procedures to tweak everything from eye tilt to the way light reflects off the jaw, and costs between $150,000 and $300,000. There are also “

forever-35

,” “

Diamond mini

,” or “weekend” face-lifts. Plastic surgeons in Washington, D.C., are navigating a surge in requests for “Mar-a-Lago face.”

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