Ani Wilcenski

The Mar-a-Lago face-off

In all the post election danger-to-democracy commentary, one unexpected new peril has emerged: the “nationwide surge of Mar-a-Lago face." Best exemplified by demented far-right activist Laura Loomer and former Fox News host-slash-former Donald Trump Jr. squeeze Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mar-a-Lago face is a cosmetic look characterized by immense volumes of cheek filler, heavy eye shadow and enough Botox to petrify the face. The male version could be seen when Florida congressman and attorney general-nominee-for-ten-seconds Matt Gaetz stepped out at the RNC with so much Botox and foundation that he instantly became a bipartisan meme. I’d argue that Mar-a-Lago face is not taking over America anytime soon. It’s barely taking over the Republican Party.

cosmetic

Why is Generation Z so undersexed?

There is a girl on TikTok, a bleached-blonde New York transplant who just passed a million followers, whose videos I cannot stop watching. The secret to her rise was “Get Ready with Me” storytimes in which she sat in front of the camera applying mascara and retelling — in painstaking detail — her lurid misadventures. Some highlights: throwing up on a guy’s bed after a wine-fueled hook-up and then realizing he had a girlfriend of two years, battling Montezuma’s revenge at a restaurant in Cabo, getting a UTI so bad she thought it was a kidney infection, inadvertently shipping a ton of “hot girl summer whore clothes” to a guy whose white sheets she bled all over after acquiring a polyp.

mystique