Conservative Beauty Trends: Tradwives, Hyperfemininity & the New Face of the Right
Hello, I’m Adeline. I write Ginseng & Tonic to deliver a straight shot of cultural & skincare analysis to your inbox every most Sundays. Subscribe for deep dives into the intersections of culture and beauty by a former cultural studies professor and current skincare formulator.
When Trump set foot for the second time in the White House, fashion and beauty headlines were dominated by breathless coverage of “inauguration fashion.” While his first inauguration was marked by 4.6 million people demonstrating at the Women’s March, Trump’s second was characterized by a litany of excited takes on who was wearing what look and which designer in lieu of coverage of the pink pussy hats of the feminist resistance.
The stark difference between Trump’s two inaugurations is significant. On the one hand, it may speak to the exhaustion felt by the left. On the other, it signifies the tightening hold of the right on our cultural and social imaginations.
In this Substack, I’ll use the recent buzz on inauguration fashion to analyze the current prevalence of conservative beauty trends, their authoritarian undertones (and overtones), and how the new Right is an active force in funding this new dystopian wellness influencer landscape.
If you’ve noticed a disturbing movement towards the right in beauty and wellness spaces, you’ll want to keep reading.
The Rise of the #Tradwife
The hashtag #tradwife has taken social media by storm in the past few years. Embodied by conventionally beautiful influencers glamorizing a romanticized “traditional wife” lifestyle, these immaculately groomed, modestly dressed women appear eternally happy to prepare elaborate meals for their husbands and children. The #tradwife trend promotes a regressive femininity where women are blissfully subservient in their domestic roles.
The 2025 inauguration spotlit these hyper-traditional ideals. As Monia Merabet notes, Ivanka Trump and her daughter wore outfits strikingly similar to those on the Handmaid’s Tale show, indicating right-wing elite consent to these reactionary ideals.
There are clear fascist undertones to the #tradwife life. The Nazi doctrine Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church) espoused that the god-given role of women was in the kitchen tending to her children. Similar to the tradwife aesthetic, the Nazis declared that women should focus on “natural” beauty, long hair, modest clothing and an outright rejection of “decadent” modern trends.
Hyperfemininity & Hypermasculinity: the Antidote to #TransPanic
Hyperfemininity is the most significant aspect of tradwife culture. It is the deliberate amplification of traditional gender roles (like demure behavior and dress) and features (like exaggerated hourglass silhouettes). In current conservative beauty culture, hyperfemininity serves as the pliant counterpart to hypermasculinity, now personified by a domineering, militantly aggressive performance of manhood.
Hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity were highlights of Trump’s second inauguration. One of the most viral moments of the inauguration was Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent stare at the cleavage of Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend. Sanchez had chosen to wear a lacy white bra and blazer as her inauguration outfit—all drawing attention to her full, surgically enhanced breasts.
Attention to Lauren Sanchez’s breasts—an exaggerated amplification of the feminine figure, is a performance of hyperfemininity, or “a concentrated effort to draw these really hard lines for gender while denying gender.” (1:02:47)
Significantly, Mark Zuckerberg himself has also undergone a hypermasculine transformation in recent years, from sunlight-deprived skinny coder to a bronzed jiu-jitsu trained fighter. This shift isn’t simply physical. In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg lamented that the corporate world had become “pretty culturally neutured” and longed for a return to “masculine energy.” This was then followed up with Meta ending its content moderation policy.
Both hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity reinforce a strict, immutable gender binary, a conservative dream ideal of men and women as polar opposites. As the journalist Naomi Fry ironically summarizes it, this salacious moment represented a return to a strict gender order: “At long last, we were back: women once again equaled boobs, men once again equalled hard-ons, order was being restored, decline was being averted, God bless America.”
Hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity are the right wing corrective against trans gender fluidity. These extreme aesthetics reinforce the retrograde sentiment that men and women can only exist in stark, opposing categories, and then any attempt to float between these two categories is harshly regulated.
The New Face of the Right Is Aspirationally Cute & Gives You Beauty Tips
While #tradwives and their idyllic farm lifestyles may have been dominating your social media feeds, what may not have been as clear is that these influencers and the trends they promote are actively funded by right wing political interests. Charlie Kirk, executive director of Turning Point USA, told the New York Times that their organization has “made long-term investments in creators and in influential voices that we believe will be the shapers of tomorrow.”
Unlike conservative women of past generations, these new right-wing influencers do not start off with political messaging. Their content on your FYP will appear more like a listicle on “3 fun workouts to try while your baby is sleeping” before you realize you’re down a rabbithole which has convinced you that vaccines are evil.
Emily Amick brilliantly dissects this in a recent Substack piece “How MAGA’s Playbook Went from Joe Rogan to Candace Owens” where she analyzes 3 of the content creators who are actively funded by MAGA: Candace Owens, Brett Cooper and Alex Clarke:
Candace Owens (5.6 million Instagram followers) first hooks you with her skincare tips (from her partnership with Nimi Skincare), explaining to you how to keep toxins out of your body with non-toxic skincare, then seamlessly transitions to conspiracy theories about toxins in vaccines
Brett Cooper (9 million followers across platforms) blends celebrity gossip, rustic farm life and cute dog videos and then tells you why the Department of Education should be abolished
Alex Clarke (411k Instagram followers), self-branded “cuteservative” queen, extols to you the benefits of raw milk for your health, informs you through an interview with a “toxic product injury attorney” about the toxins in your skincare products all before seducing you into getting rid of your birth control
Influencers are just one prong of the new conservative strategy to ensnare the hearts and minds of young women and convince them to join the new right. They are also coming for traditional fashion and beauty media.
Evie Magazine is one of these new right-wing vehicles. Funded by Peter Thiel, Evie’s branding makes women browsing think they might be on a Vogue or Elle webpage, while getting them to read stories with headlines like: “THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SEXY: Why Society Needs Aspirational Beauty.”
These creators are hijacking feminism and repackaging it using perfect pancake recipes to pull women from left to right. They aren’t telling you that feminism is bad. Instead as Emily Amick notes, the new right is telling you that they are offering women “real” feminism, and “how the left’s version of feminism actually failed women and made them miserable.”
Soft Selling Authoritarianism Is Working
This isn’t the first time right wing white supremacy has tried to hijack feminism. In 2017 during Trump’s first presidency, cultural theorist Flavia Dzodan identified an “alt-feminism” that purported women like Megan Kelly and Ivanka Trump were “advancing feminism” with their careers and work ethics.
But unlike alt-feminism, tradwives aren’t selling another version of Sheryl Sandberg style girlboss liberation at all. Instead, they’re selling you empowerment via your own subjugation.
The new face of the Right is insidiously adorable, and seduces you to give up your civil rights with glossy listicles about clean beauty. By repackaging subservience as the real feminism, they are managing to slip themselves into the aspirational moodboards of women everywhere.
The question now is: will the Left be able to catch up? If we do not quickly and systematically organize to enter this culture war, many women be convinced to participate in their own oppression. Many already are.
I liked the term “soft selling authoritarianism”
Why aren’t we soft selling democratic socialism?
I love to bake bread and I found motherhood extremely fulfilling but fuck the fascists!!!!