A couple weeks ago we talked about lip filler for your dick. This week we are apparently going to talk about lip filler for your hump. No, that’s not new slang for anyone’s genitalia; it’s actually a hump. Today we’re talking about camels. Brings new meaning to hump day, doesn’t it? (Sorry. Had to. Just be glad I got that very obvious Wednesday joke out of the way early so we can move on.) Twenty camels were disqualified from the 2026 Camel Beauty Show Festival in Al Musanaa, Oman because the veterinarians who examined them believed that they’d had work done.
According to Tanya Akim at Forbes, camel contestants are judged on coat, neck, head, and hump. Judges want then to have shiny hair that is, well, camel colored. They want a long, wide neck and a large head. They’re also looking for full lips, long dark eyelashes, and a perfectly shaped hump. Some camels are born with all of this, but others need help. Camel plastic surgery is not all that different than what we’re used to in humans. There’s hyaluronic acid filler to plump lips, silicone to reshape the nose, and Botox to relax the face. Owners have also been accused of adding silicone wax to make the hump humpier and giving the animals hormones to help them get buff. This is not the first dromedary display to be dogged by drama. In 2018, dozens of animals at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz Camel Festival were disqualified for lip fillers and Botox. At the same contest in 2021, more than 40 contestants were kicked out for hormone use and/or unnaturally stretched noses. All of this amounts to pretty serious animal cruelty as there are side effects to every cosmetic procedure, and no one asked the camels if they wanted poutier lips. Akim explained the myriad of ways camels might suffer for beauty. Injections are painful and often cause swelling and bruising. If they’re not done correctly, they may lead to infection or necrotic (dead) tissue. Botox can paralyze the same nerves that camels need to eat and drink. Silicone fillers can cause chronic inflammation and granulomas (infections that build up around foreign bodies). In addition, hormones can cause infertility, behavioral changes, and muscular imbalances. Obviously, much of the motive for altering your camel is financial. The Saudi contest has a prize pool worth upwards of $66 million. But Akim—who calls these scandals a “collision of ancient ritual and modern vanity”—points out that there’s much more to it than that.
Akim, a beauty writer who presumably focuses on humans more often than camels, concludes her article by saying, “The camel with Botox is an ultimate metaphor for our era: even the stoic ships of the desert have succumbed to the siren song of aesthetic self-improvement.” As much as I wanted this to be just a silly story about camels with puffy lips, stiff foreheads, and fake eyelashes, I can’t help thinking about the other over-filled, extra-Botoxed face that made the news this week. Yes, I’m talking about our very own Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas Kristi Noem. (There’s a joke in non-profits that when someone is bad at their job or terrible at managing people they get named Director of Special Projects. It’s a demotion disguised as a pivotal role. Kristi’s title is even better. It’s like someone asked ChatGPT to make up a title that sounded really important, and the bot went Marvel instead of MAGA.) Kristi Noem’s face has been the subject of almost as many stories as her cruel policies and f**k pad on wings. Normally, I hate to comment on someone’s physical appearance, but Kristi is different and not just because she’s a truly horrible person. She’s different because like so many other women in Trump’s orbit, she has turned her appearance into a political statement.
Mar-a-Lago face—as it has come to be known—focuses on big lips, flat foreheads, puffed up cheeks, bright white teeth, and contoured jaws. It requires Botox, lip and cheek filler, veneers, and sometimes full-on plastic surgery to change the shape of the nose or the jaw line. The day-to-day look also includes a spray tan, loads of foundation (usually in a shade that’s bronzier than one’s natural skin tone), smokey eyes, false eyelashes, and thickly painted on eyebrows. Hair extensions are optional, but short hair is a no-no. This is not the facelift my grandmother had when she was 72 that was supposed to make her look well-rested and allow her to believably say she was still in her early 60s. (This was around the time she began introducing me to people as “a close friend of the family” so as not to admit she had a twenty-something grandchild.) Whereas no one was supposed to know Grandma had had work done, these Republican women want everyone to know. That’s the point. Caroline Heldman, a political scientist as Occidental College, told Yahoo News that the face is seen as a “badge of honor” to some women:
Speaking to Mother Jones last year, Ann Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College, said this about the motives behind the procedures:
Other public examples of this new face include Lara Trump (who managed to parlay being married to Eric Trump into being the co-chair of the Republican party), Laura Loomer (a far right commentator and sometimes date of the President), and Kimberly Guilfoyle (who went from being Gavin Newsom’s wife to being Don Jr.’s girlfriend to being the Ambassador to Greece).
Karoline Leavitt gets honorable mention because of the Vanity Fair close-up photos which showed pinpoint scabs that likely came from recent injections of lip filler. (Though this puzzled viewers because the photo also showed the exact fine lines and wrinkles that recent injections of lip filler should have fixed.) While she’s clearly had some work done, Karoline looks slightly more natural than many of her MAGA peers. Of course, she’s only 28, let’s see what she’s done to herself by 55.
Melania also gets an honorable mention. Until I saw the pictures of her hanging out with Epstein and Maxwell in her 20s, I’d assumed her perfectly chiseled nose and cheek bones were a product of Slavic heritage not a Park Avenue plastic surgeon. She hasn’t gone as all-in as some, but the photo evidence makes it clear that she’s tinkered. There are others like Lauren Sanchez Bezos and Erika Kirk, plus plenty of people who don’t know Trump personally. Plastic surgeons around the country have said they have patients asking for similar looks. The moniker “Mar-a-Lago face” comes from women in Palm Beach who are so desperate to become members of that club that they’ll do anything to look the part.
Sometimes I wonder what these women see when they look in the mirror or catch themselves on TV. Kristi clearly loved her new look: she dressed it up in tight jeans and cowboy hats and spent $220 million on ads of her riding around on a horse. (It was these ads that likely got her s**t canned, by the way.) While I think Melania is objectively still very beautiful, the others in my humble opinion all look much prettier in their before pictures. Of course, none of them care what I think of their new look, and it’s possible that none of them care about what they think either. This is performative plastic surgery that is entirely meant for the male gaze, and specifically for Trump. These are the same people who heard Trump boast about grabbing women by the pussy and thought to themselves, “He could grab my pussy anytime.” Or worse, “What’s wrong with me that he hasn’t grabbed my pussy?” In a cliquey, hierarchal system (think middle school cafeteria) where status is built not on merit or skills but on attractiveness and popularity, your best bid for attention is a careful balance of conformity and “look-at-me” showiness. This is not unlike a beauty pageant where the goal is to be the perfect version of a certain archetype—be it woman or camel. (Let’s not forget that Donald Trump has owned three beauty pageants in his lifetime and boasted about being the only man allowed to barge into the dressing room while teenage contestants were getting ready.) I do believe that everyone has a right to alter their physical appearance in whatever ways they want whether that’s face tattoos, a chin job, or a septum piercing. I just wish these women were doing it for themselves and not to win the attention of a very fickle man who has proven time and time again that he hates women. As Amanda Marcotte of Salon points out, this is how Kristi’s cost-benefit analysis of changing her appearance missed the point:
Kristi was incompetent and evil for sure, but she’s no more incompetent than Pete Hegseth and might even be less mean-spirited than Steven Miller. No matter what she did to her lips or how long she made her eyelashes, however, she would still be a second-class citizen. It should surprise no one that the only cabinet member to be thrown under the clown bus so far is female. And that’s what I hate about Mar-a-Lago face. Women are getting painful procedures that cost a fortune so that they can walk into a room and announce—without saying a word—that they never wanted to be more than a camel on parade. Sex on Wednesday is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Sex on Wednesday that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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She's Had Some Work Done
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