Episode 68 -- Republican Makeup with Jessica DeFino

In Bed With The Right

Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Sexuality

4.8 • 662 Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When it comes to the protagonists of MAGA world, they -- like Roxette circa 1990 -- have THE LOOK. You know the one: hair that rises and crests like a mountain range, lips that are strangely beige and eyes that really show off how dead the person is on the inside. How did this style come to define the modern conservative aesthetic? What are its influences? What are its messages? Jessica DeFino (of The Review of Beauty fame) stops by In Bed with the Right to help Moira and a very lost Adrian make some sense of these and other questions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You reject your humanity for the sake of becoming this godlike figure with a godlike power.
0:06.3	And that really is what Republicans are doing, particularly in this gender affirming care space.
0:11.3	They're saying, I am a woman. So I am allowed to use these interventions. And you are not.
0:18.6	And you're really taking up this sort of like godlike authority. And I think
0:23.0	this pull to get rid of like all traces of human life on your face really is part of that sort of
0:29.1	performance of authority.
0:36.5	Hello, I'm Adrienne Dob.
0:38.1	And I'm Lower Dodd again.
0:39.3	And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
0:43.0	So, Adrian, today for this very special episode, we are talking about a little trend, both in life and on TikTok, called Republican makeup. What do you know about Republican makeup?
0:58.2	Nothing. Okay, great. Literally nothing. I'm so sorry. I mean, I saw the topic on the schedule, and I sort of, I conjured some people. I was like, oh, yeah, there's like, well, I know about, like, Fox News hair.
1:15.4	So I was like, oh, okay, like, would stand to reason. But that's literally as far as I got.
1:24.2	Got to be honest. Okay. Well, Republican makeup is a TikTok trend and a hashtag that arose from the fact that, you know, I don't know if you've noticed, but Republicans look kind of different than us mere mortals. I'm thinking like, you know, iconic high profile Republican women like Kimberly Gilfoyle, Melania Trump, Christine Noam, our new Homeland Security Secretary, Congresswoman Nancy Mace. They've got a particular look. It's very specific. There is a lot of fillers,
1:48.9	especially on the lips and cheeks. There's usually like a nude lip. There is foundation that's like
1:56.1	kind of the wrong shade, very large kind of feathery false eyelashes often. And there is a very specific
2:05.7	hair, the Fox News hair, which is these waist length coiled waves, right? And in our dock,
2:14.2	I've put in a couple of iconic examples. I've got Kimberly Girofoil at the RNC.
2:18.9	I've got Laura Lumer, the sort of like right-wing troll,
2:23.3	who's had, you know, some procedures done to look a very specific way.
2:28.5	I've got like kind of this picture of Christine Nome at an ice raid doing her, you know, Gestapo Barbie.
2:35.6	Honestly, when I looked at that in the planning, I was like, well, did this like migrate over here from our planning for the AI slop one?
2:42.7	Because this looks like someone was like, chat GPT generate Christine Nome in an ice uniform.
	...

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