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This is “The Opinions,” a show that brings you a mix of voices from “New York Times Opinion.” You’ve heard the news. Here’s what to make of it.

I’m Meher Ahmad. I’m an editor for “New York Times Opinion.” From right-wing influencers to tradwives, there’s an immediately recognizable aesthetic that’s easy to clock. Let’s call it MAGA beauty. It’s visible everywhere, from TikTok videos to White House press briefings. And for the women in Trump’s world, that look often goes hand in hand with an aggressive approach to politics and power.

But it didn’t necessarily start with the GOP. So to unpack the look and what it means, I’m joined by Jessica Grose. She’s a writer for “Opinion” who covers family, education, religion, and culture, and she recently wrote a piece about this aesthetic for her newsletter. Jessica, thanks for joining me.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

So, I guess to start, I wondered if you could describe what the conservative female aesthetic looks like.

So it starts with so-called Utah curls, and those were popularized by Mormon momfluencers. They are usually center-parted curl.

The makeup look is very heavy. It is flat and matte, as the influencer Suzanne Lambert told me. She is a comedian and content creator who has made a number of incredibly funny TikToks about what she calls Republican makeup.

It is often cosmetically enhanced, or appears to be cosmetically enhanced.

Often, is accessorized with big old crosses, so a big cross necklace or earrings. And the clothes are always form fitting, whether they are casual, or corporate wear, or cocktail dress.

And how does it stand out to you? Like, I guess in a lot of ways, I feel as though what you’ve described is a little bit out of touch with the mainstream of what beauty standards are currently, which is more dewy, minimalist, like a no-makeup makeup, clean-girl aesthetic. It kind of contrasts from it in a big way, right?

Well, I think it depends. I think there are a lot of influencers who are making money with that look. I would call it runoff Kardashian. The Kardashians themselves have moved on from this look, this sort of heavily makeup, contoured look. And because algorithms run on homogeneity, I think having that look makes it easier to go viral, because it’s already saying, I am part of this particular team. And so before anything actually comes out of their mouths, you already have an idea of who they are and potentially what they stand for.

It’s like an aesthetic signal of their politics.

Right. And, I mean, to be clear, we are all aesthetically signaling. I remember The New York Times Style section ran an article about how all Brooklyn moms wear No. 6 clogs. And I was like, you didn’t need to call me out like that. Like, I’m not trying to say that I’m any different. I am responding to my own sociological cues and the women who are around me. And we’re all making aesthetic choices when we put ourselves out there. This is just sort of anthropologically looking at the types of choices that a lot of prominent female politicians in the MAGA universe are making.

And who are those prominent politicians? Who are the faces of this aesthetic in the Trump White House in particular?

So Kristi Noem, who is the Secretary of Homeland Security, is sort of the most prominent and obvious choice, just because she has contrasted that particular look with an incredibly brutal message, both visually and with the words that are coming out of her mouth.

So our colleague M. Gessen called this out as the image of the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, was Kristi Noem standing in front of a jail full of mostly shirtless prisoners in El Salvador. She is heavily made up. She is wearing a $50,000 Rolex, and the contrast of the amount of care that went into her image against the brutality of these imprisoned men was obviously an image that stays with many of us. But also, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and Nancy Mace, who is not in the Trump cabinet or chosen by Trump, but she is a Republican Congresswoman from South Carolina.

Yeah, I wanted to dig into that Kristi Noem moment a little bit further, the contrast of her and her kind of exaggerated glam with the men standing behind her in the prison. In a way, it’s one of those things where I can’t imagine the man version of it, where it’s like, what’s a man MAGA look like? So do you think part of this has to do with the fact that they’re women and there’s kind of extra scrutiny on how they appear because of the fact that they’re women in politics?

I do think that is part of it. I think the image is more provocative because it’s unusual, right? I mean, although other women have obviously served in the role that Noem serves in, none have been so outspoken or created so many press moments that she has chosen to create.

However, I do think that the male version is probably Elon Musk. He is wearing the baseball cap like she’s wearing. He’s out here with the chainsaw. So I think that there is sort of a male version in the MAGA multiverse, but I don’t think it would have been as indelible an image if there had been a male politician in the same role.

Yeah. I was thinking back to the comment that Vivek Ramaswamy made about Nikki Haley’s heels, and I remember that was something that you had discussed as well. Her kind of comeback about it was like, it’s not a fashion statement, it’s for ammunition. And, in a way, I’m interested in knowing what you think about the understanding that some of these women have about how they’re perceived and the kind of decision making that might go into how they look.

I think any woman who’s in the public eye at all has to grapple with this. They will get comments based on their appearance, attacking their appearance in ways that male politicians never would. And so I think having a sort of uniform look, whatever that look may be — like with Hillary Clinton, it’s the pantsuit — that is a kind of armor. It’s a kind of mask. It’s a kind of way to prevent people from talking about what you look like, if the way that you look is the same every time.

And it is potentially a way to get the message across further. And so part of the argument that I make in the piece is that by using the vernacular of influencers, it’s something familiar to viewers of social media, and it helps them get their message across even further than they might have otherwise.

Yeah. You’ve covered the intersection of politics and culture for a while now, and I was curious to know how you feel like the roots of the current conservative beauty trend might have come about. Because, as you said, it’s come kind of like from a Kardashian runoff.

And I think this look in particular, the matte foundation and over-accentuated eyes, that’s something that I feel like people associate with 2016 makeup. So I wonder if you’ve thought about why it’s become this look of conservatism in particular.

I think some of it is from southern culture, from pageant culture. I think some of it is it’s Trump specifically, his preferred look. I mean, he famously ran a beauty pageant. So it is, in some ways, appealing to this audience of one, which is a prerequisite for this role.

But I also think it is a way to hold themselves in opposition to people that they feel are not gender conforming. And so you see it with Nancy Mace a lot. She is often attacking trans women specifically, and holding herself separate from them, and saying, I’m a real woman. And so this hyper-feminine look, I think, is a way to communicate that as well.

Yeah, I know. It’s one of those things where I think it’s kind of fascinating and ironic, that a lot of the aesthetics of this are kind of like playing up and performing gender in a way, that they’re in a camp where they’re like, this is what a true woman should look like.

Yeah, it all feels drag adjacent, so I don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s the big fake eyelashes, like, the really just — it’s exaggerated.

But I think part of that is also about knowing their audience. I think they consciously know that their images are going to be reproduced on social media. And I think just having things be sort of exaggerated looks better.

Well, the other thing, I guess, about the folks that are not in political power, more in the influencer side of it — you wrote a little bit about the avenues to power and influencing for women, and how that fits the mold of a more conservative viewpoint of what a woman should be, which is not in the highest positions of power. But influencing provides this alternative pathway to having influence.

Having influence. And so when I wrote my book about American motherhood, I have a chapter about social media and momfluencing. And one of the major revelations of that chapter for me was that in a lot of conservative communities where women are not encouraged to have day jobs, to have any kind of corporate job outside the home, influencing was the only way for them to have a real voice and for them to make money while still fulfilling their community’s perceived as their real role as wives and mothers.

And so that’s where a lot of paid influencing started, was in communities like that. And so I think it is still considered an acceptable way to make money, because again, you can still look perfectly feminine in a way that is very conformist and in a very specific idea of beauty. And you’re still at the whim of the algorithm and at the whim of the companies that are paying you for brand deals. So you’re not ultimately the person who is making the decisions, but you’re still making money in some way, and you still have a kind of power, particularly over other women.

Right. Right. There’s this term being used now, the woman-o-sphere. It’s like the woman version of the manosphere. You wrote in your piece about Karoline Leavitt and her kind of doing a video with a TikTok influencer, like a running influencer.

So it seems like these kind of — even the people in position and power in the White House also kind of go hand in hand with the influencer womanosphere part of it as well.

Yeah, they have been incredibly smart about co-opting these channels to get their message across. And it is sort of, in some ways, the female version of going on Joe Rogan, but it has a much smaller reach, and there’s a much greater backlash to it, I think. Because if you look at the statistics, Gen Z women in particular, not conservative, overwhelmingly. And so if you’re trying to appeal to women, especially women under 30, being very conservative and emphasizing roles as wives and mothers isn’t necessarily the way to do it.

It’s really interesting. I spent some time reading new conservative women’s magazines. One is called “Evie” and one is called “The Conservator.” And one of them had an interview with Karoline Leavitt, and it was praising her for basically taking no maternity leave. She spent very little time off the campaign trail.

And look, I was someone who was eager to go back to work after maternity leave, so I have absolutely no judgment on the choices one makes around those things. But from a party that is emphasizing women’s sort of natural — and you can’t see me making air quotes over this podcast — roles as wives and mothers, it’s really interesting to see them also really praising someone like Karoline Leavitt for not necessarily putting that first. So I think it’s just they’re working out how to graft their message onto a generation of women that has clearly moved forward in some profound way.

Well, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, you’ve written about how this look, combined with aggressive social media clips, often leads to virality, right? And that can grow into a national platform. And so with Congresswoman Nancy Mace, she’s considering a run for governor of South Carolina. It seems like this formula could either work really well for her or it could backfire. Just for our listeners, could you tell us a little bit more about that Nancy Mace story and what happened in the beauty store?

So she is a supporter of Donald J. Trump to the extent that on her TikTok, she has an entire library of videos that are titled “DJT” with a little American flag emoji. And we know exactly what happened, because they were both filming. So the constituent asked, sort of pointedly, when’s your next town hall going to be.

And it sort of escalates from there.

She then says to him, well, I voted for gay marriage twice.

And she’s clearly sort of trying to point out to him that — it just gets pretty ugly. Like, I don’t want to — I can’t read her mind. I don’t know what her intention was there, but —

Because he’s a man in the beauty aisle?

Yes.

I see.

And he had, I think, confirmed that he is gay. And then when she posted it to her social media, she said that he was basically like a liberal maniac and that he was wearing Daisy Dukes shorts. And, by the way, those shorts were not that short. But it was clearly a dog whistle about his masculinity, and it was not appropriate. I mean, the fact that an elected official, a Congressperson, did that.

I know that we have lost the capacity for disgust or shame or any of that, but I even found that shocking that she would do that. And so it can be sort of a turnoff, even for people within your own camp. You’ve seen even in very, very red states, there can be a bridge too far in terms of the rage baiting, really out there conservative behavior. So, we’ll have to wait and see.

Well, one of the things your piece and this discussion made me think about is the fact that there’s not necessarily a cohesive Democrat aesthetic, you know what I mean? I was thinking about how the right often kind of uses mockingly the blue hairs as sort of describing woke reactionaries, people who dye their hair in crazy colors. But I wondered if you had any thoughts on why it feels like the conservative aesthetic of a woman is so clear and clockable and why that hasn’t really manifested in the left as much.

I do think because they have such a narrow vision of appropriate femininity, so it is easier to have the trappings. I think just it is more of a challenge for liberals to speak in a uniform style vernacular because part of the liberal ethos is like, wear what you want or have more sort of individuality in terms of your fashion or gender expression.

I guess, should Democrats spend time trying to make a female mascot akin to Karoline Leavitt or Kristi Noem? Or do you think that’s antithetical to what Democrats stand for? Is it not something that they should fight back with, or do you think the fact that there’s no alternative on their side is kind of a sign of what the party stands for?

I think there would just be no way to do it and have it feel organic. It’s like why we keep having the discussion on why isn’t there a liberal Joe Rogan? It’s like, well, he wasn’t built in a lab. He gained that organic popularity and association with right wing ideas over time, and he doesn’t just talk about politics.

I mean, it’s interesting to know that one thing about a lot of these social media platforms is that viral trends are fickle, and they can change very quickly. Do you see, in the near or long-term future, this kind of reward for this type of aesthetic or even kind of a political stance taking a turn? Do you think potentially audiences might tire from it?

I think they absolutely can. I mean, you see a TikTok has 7 million views, well, you don’t know how many of those are hate views or hate comments. And so there’s not necessarily a linear correlation between everybody seeing something and everybody supporting something. And so it could really have a different outcome in terms of how people are voting.

I mean, you saw this with Kari Lake in Arizona, right? I would say that she has that sort of same aesthetic and that same really combative approach, and she did not win in that state. So we’ll see what happens. I can’t predict the future. I do hope people tire of this, because it is exhausting.

And will you be buying matte or dewy foundation?

I am dewy. I just want to look like a glazed donut all the time. Who doesn’t?

Coastal elite.

Coastal elite glazed donut, that’s me.

Jessica, thank you for joining me. It’s been a lovely conversation.

Thanks so much for having me.

?] If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. “The Opinions” is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vishakha Darbha, Kristina Samulewski, and Jillian Weinberger. It’s edited by Kaari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie-Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud, and Efim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.