Rich People Didn’t Look Like This Before

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

Rich People Didn’t Look Like This Before

 

April 30, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/plastic-surgery-rich-face.html?searchResultPosition=1

By Amy Odell

Ms. Odell is the author of the Back Row newsletter and “Anna: The Biography.”

 

If you spend enough time around the very rich these days, it’s clear. People didn’t look like this before 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 “Doctor 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 seem 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” and “weekend” face-lifts. Plastic surgeons in Washington are navigating a surge in requests for “Mar-a-Lago face.”

 

The masses want in. Millennials who say they cannot afford homes are spending on their faces instead. Magazines such as Vogue and Allure are no longer just advising readers on nail polish colors and designer sandals for spring, but also when — not if — they should get face-lifts. Rhinoplasties, face-lifts and blepharoplasties (eyelid surgeries) were the three most popular facial procedures of 2025, and the number of facial procedures overall increased by around 19 percent. The luxury sector, meanwhile, contracted by 2 percent last year.

 

Designer fashion seems to be viewed as more cringe than cosmetic procedures — a feeling that the journalist Sujata Assomull calls the “luxury ick.” Many designer brands raised prices significantly in recent years, at around twice the rate of inflation, without any apparent improvement in quality. (A Chanel flap bag can now cost upward of $11,000 — almost double what it did in 2016.) And some have been caught up in sweatshop scandals. The Row’s sample sale in New York City inspired a slew of viral parody videos. The thriving market for secondhand goods, dupes and counterfeits dim the glamour of it all. And when brands like Celine and Chloé are reissuing old handbag designs, why bother shopping for something new?

 

In earlier decades, the roles were reversed: Plastic surgery was a punchline. “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware,” Joan Rivers once joked. Now Ms. Rivers seems ahead of her time. Procedures are a sign of making it in the most Kardashian-coded way — get rich, then buy a face. Stars such as Kris Jenner go viral for their cosmetic work. Asked if she’d had “the seemingly ubiquitous new style of face-lift,” Jennifer Lawrence told The New Yorker, “No. But, believe me, I’m gonna!”

 

Social media has turbocharged the normalization of cosmetic work. One plastic surgeon said that his Gen Z patients take selfies at their appointments “as if it’s a concert or a ‘get ready with me’ video. They want everyone to know.” Like haul vlogs, it’s a way to say, “Look what I just bought.”

 

Of course, rich face has regional variations. Bravo’s “Real Housewives” from the Upper East Side and the Hamptons have a subtler look than their counterparts on Netflix’s “Members Only: Palm Beach,” who dream of access to Mar-a-Lago. Whether stars admit to their work or not, endless internet speculation provides valuable P.R. to both them and the surgeons who treat them. Many of these doctors — such as Steven Levine, who lifted Ms. Jenner’s face — are celebrities themselves. All of this media hooks viewers by inviting them to wonder when lips were last injected and if jawlines look more “snatched” than they did the previous week.

 

Sometimes, of course, procedures can go wrong. Sharon Osbourne once called a face-lift “the worst thing that I ever did,” and said that she “looked like Cyclops.” Khloe Kardashian has said that filler made her look “crazy.”

 

Designer bags may be silly, overpriced and quite often unethically made. But at least there’s little to no chance they will disfigure you. Perhaps the risk of a grisly outcome is part of the appeal for the ultrawealthy, who have the ability to pay for the best care, along with more treatments if things go wrong. The luxury of viewing your face-lift less as a major, potentially ruinous surgery and more as a routine to-do list item is the ultimate status symbol.