The images are familiar: square-jawed white men, faces set hard, barking the language of strength and command. Over the past week, as the United States has pressed its military campaign in the Middle East, the face of defense secretary Pete Hegseth has appeared on screen after screen delivering the rhetoric of the warrior-patriarch. It is a face already known for other performances: posing in the gym alongside Robert F Kennedy Jr for the Department of War YouTube channel; lecturing the military about “fat generals”; hosting a weekend show on Fox News.
But here, borrowing the glory of the troops, Hegseth presented the general’s mask – the jutting jaw, the unflinching gaze – albeit without, some critics would suggest, the military experience or strategic judgment it usually signifies. Donald Trump, too, has offered his own version of the strongman face; the commanding presence, white and unyielding, though recently people have been rather more distracted by the new rash on his neck.
Maga face … Elon Musk. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Trump and his cabinet are performing militaristic power at the precise moment when the white male face has become its own theatre of authority. Other icons of the Maga (Make America Great Again) movement, like Elon Musk, have also had public “glow ups”. Even JD Vance politically rebranded with a beard during his 2022 Senate bid to emphasise his blue-collar ruggedness. He is now known on Chinese TikTok as the “eyeliner man”.
Men’s faces are under scrutiny as never before, in positions of cultural as well as political power: on red carpets, in tabloid closeups, across social media feeds, and in movies, TV shows and adverts. Their features are pored over, speculated about and dissected. Has Bradley Cooper had fillers? Does Brad Pitt have a new jawline? Is that really Jim Carrey?
Scrutinising the face is not new, but it is women’s faces that historically dominated media attention, usually questioning whether or not they have had cosmetic surgery, and who might look older, younger, fatter or thinner. For women, the homogenisation of beauty standards has been well documented: before we had “Mar-a-Lago face” – which exists to showcase the work, wealth and whiteness involved in being that polished, pumped and preserved – we had Instagram face, with a vocabulary of cookie-cutter features that made it difficult to distinguish one face from another.
‘Unflinching gaze’ … Pete Hegseth. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP
But a parallel shift in men’s faces has been happening too – towards something more sculpted, managed and self-conscious. In recent years we’ve seen an explosion of grooming products, “gymfluencers”, body “hacks”, tombstone veneers – “Turkey teeth” in the UK, “Mexican teeth” in the US. Cosmetic surgery has entered the public arena for men, too, most publicly in 2021 with the designer Marc Jacobs’ facelift. “There is no shame in being vain,” Jacobs announced, uploading selfies that showed blood-filled drainage tubes flanking his bandaged head.
But is this vanity? The pursuit of Desperate Dan jawlines and “hunter eyes” helps account for a growing proportion of male cosmetic surgery procedures, that have contributed to an overall 40% increase globally since 2020. Men are worrying about their faces more than ever. But what are they worrying about?
That’s a question I asked Dan Saleh, a leading plastic and cosmetic surgeon and founder of The Face Institute at the Beverley Hospital and Clinic in Gateshead. Post-Covid, Saleh’s clinic saw a notable increase in male consultations compared with female ones: one in five, rather than one in 10 pre-Covid. His clients worry about eye bags, sagging skin and “Zoom chin”, which became a problem with the rise of video calling. Facelifts are more in demand, too, often linked to GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic that cause the face to sag. Saleh doesn’t think men are becoming more vain, just that cosmetic surgery is more firmly part of the “wellness” arena now – and a consumer choice.
Mar-a-Lago face … Kristi Noem. Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
In this marketplace, however, not all faces are equal. The jaw contouring, hunter eyes and angular features driving the male beauty conversation represent a western European aesthetic being universalised through social media algorithms and cosmetic surgery. If we read the new focus on men’s faces as vanity, or an inevitable product of social media, or even some gender-based schadenfreude – with men experiencing what women have dealt with for centuries – we miss what’s important. Which is that while the face has become a consumer object for men and women alike, the drivers, and consequences, are different.
Women’s faces have always been valued in terms of beauty. Men’s faces might be admired for their visual appeal, but they are also literal and symbolic figureheads – and sites of political power. Even more than the Mar-a-Lago face, male faces are showing us the impact of neoliberalism, in our politics, on our screens, and in our surgeons’ consulting rooms.
We can’t understand or explain this without turning to the neglected history of the human face. For centuries, as I show in my book The Face: A Cultural History, faces have been used to evaluate human worth. Before “race”, whiteness and symmetry were celebrated in the Bible and in the classical world; Isaiah 1:18 declares “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow”, while Aristotle claimed that black skin showed cowardice. Physiognomy also found “proof” that a person’s morality, intelligence and virtue was reflected in the shape of their nose and the curve of their brow.
These rules found their way into art and culture, as well as coinage. Aristotle said that men with small eyes lacked vision, and those with weak chins were poor leaders; consequently, the coinage of his student, Alexander the Great, showed in profile the leader’s wide-open gaze and resolute jaw.
A coin with Alexander the Great’s head on Photograph: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Figureheads were not intended to capture realism, personality or conventional handsomeness. Wrinkles, furrowed brows and sagging flesh were markers of authority, reflecting the artistic convention of verism – the hyper-realistic depiction of every line, wrinkle and imperfection – that in Roman portraiture made age and experience visible markers of authority and fitness to rule. Not so women – who were occasionally sculpted but largely as adornments to men – their faces stylised after goddesses.
Beyond rulers, very few people had their faces visually represented in ancient times. Nor were people familiar with their own faces – before the 18th century, most people had never seen themselves in a mirror (it would be the 19th century before mass production brought widespread ownership).
There was more focus on faces from the Renaissance onwards, as humanism framed them as sites of interior truth. Portraiture became concerned with psychological likeness; physiognomy mattered, but so did realism. A strong chin, steady gaze and symmetry continued to signal judgment, rationality and leadership. As did whiteness: as colonial expansion revealed more diverse human faces, whiteness became coded as a mark of “civilisation”.
This coding intensified in the 18th century, as portraiture presented whiteness as biologically and morally superior. The mass markets of consumerism and urban culture reinforced “grooming” as evidence of male civility: a well-maintained beard and brow were, along with white skin, markers of wealth, leisure and respectability.
The closeup of Hollywood actors like Cary Grant triggered a demand for facial perfection. Photograph: John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
As new technologies of the face emerged, they mapped across existing hierarchies – much as social media would. Traditional racial and beauty hierarchies were reinforced by photography, which allowed anthropologists to create ever more elaborate measurements to support notions of white supremacy. Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, used composite photography to create “criminal types” and “racial types”, ranking human worth by facial features. Black faces were read as evidence of “savagery”; white faces signified “civilization” – codes that have been incorporated into the biased algorithms of modern facial recognition.
The birth of Hollywood, and advertising, amplified the celebration of the perfect face. The closeup changed everything. Pioneered in early cinema, it brought faces into unprecedented intimacy, revealing pores, asymmetries and the smallest flickers of emotion – a quivering lip, a slight tremor. This was sold as authenticity, but it also magnified every flaw and set impossible new standards. The closeup promised truth while demanding perfection, and the industry responded with new technologies of control: makeup, lighting, soft-focus lenses and – by the 1950s – cosmetic surgery.
We can see the same factors at work today in assessing male beauty. Instagram promotes pseudoscientific physiognomic ideals, such as square jaws for men, as “natural” and desirable, claiming to use the ancient principle of “the golden ratio” to define what counts as good-looking – targeting the shape and positioning of the nose, jawline and eyes to determine the ideal, symmetrical face.
‘If attraction were hard-wired, we’d still find a powdered wig the height of hotness’ … Adolf Fredrik, 1710-1771, King of Sweden. Illustration: Heritage Images/Getty Images
This information has also fed into AI systems, shaping its algorithms, and has been adopted by many cosmetic surgeons as the absolute truth. This should be debunked: symmetry is not the only thing that makes a face attractive, and the golden ratio is an outdated western European aesthetic concept.
Physiognomy, too, has made an unjustified comeback – we judge every day who is trustworthy and who is not, based on accepted markers that are often fundamentally racist. It’s there, too, in digital form, in the AI algorithms developed to “read” faces to infer emotions, character traits, sexual orientation and criminality. Cesare Lombroso, the 19th-century Italian criminologist who believed “born criminals” were identifiable by their facial structure, would be proud.
Along with cosmetic surgeons and social media influencers, evolutionary psychologists have reinforced and recycled traditional face values – telling us that women are “naturally” attracted to hunter eyes, defined chins and high testosterone. Historically specific ideals are presented as natural and immutable. But the assumption that “predatory” features equal genetic fitness says more about our cultural moment than about human nature.
Hunter eyes … David Gandy. Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage
Let’s face it, if attraction were hard-wired, we would all still be giddy for the well-turned, silk-covered calf of an 18th-century merchant and find a powdered wig the height of hotness. Fat bellies were desirable in leaner times, and mutton-chops desirable on Victorian gentlemen long before they were revived by Hoxton hipsters.
Today’s trend towards a youthful, overtly masculine ideal is a sign of our times. The logic of neoliberalism is that we treat ourselves as projects requiring constant investment and improvement. It is no surprise that it has transformed the male face into capital: it is a purchasable (but depreciable) asset, like crypto, in a world where power feels abstract and out of reach.
Which is why it is not only the male face, but a particular kind of male face, that is getting all the attention. The “experience” found in wrinkles is not needed in the age of startups; status is no longer guaranteed by experience, land or institutional office.
This logic is especially powerful in the manosphere, where there’s a pipeline between looksmaxxing and white nationalism. But even outside of the manosphere, whiteness is influential. All faces might be commodities, but they are not all equally valuable in selling a product, a film, an ideology.
‘A new generation of Hollywood heartthrobs’ … Jacob Elordi. Photograph: Stéphane Cardinale/Corbis/Getty Images
White faces, because they have always been the norm against which others are judged, are presumed to be neutral and easier to invest with diverse meanings. Perhaps that’s why a new generation of Hollywood heart-throbs – Jacob Elordi, Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler – embody a similar white, symmetrical, angular male aesthetic. They have also all been cast as brooding romantic leads, in respectively Saltburn, Bones and All, The Bikeriders, that project a fantasy of predation: desirable yet dangerous. These faces are not entirely new. They echo an older archetype – the impassive, chiselled authority of a Clint Eastwood before gender got complicated – filtered through Instagram algorithms and optimised for an age that demands masculine power to be unyielding and purchasable.
Not all faces conform to type. For every Jacob Elordi there will be an androgynous David Bowie, an “ugly-hot” Steve Buscemi and a pumped-up Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. But the white, angular, western European face that represents modern neoliberalism is considered sufficiently neutral to occupy the central space. It is also fluid enough to sit with contradictions.
JD Vance rebranded with a beard. Photograph: Joey Sussman/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Which brings us back to JD Vance. That carefully cultivated beard might signal rugged masculinity for a political base that fetishises “traditional” gender roles and mocks the idea of gender as something that is performed. But Vance’s own face – and seemingly lined eyes – is pure performance. So, in a different register is Hegseth’s: gym-honed, fixed stare, camera-ready. Trump’s own face tells a different story – the 1980s tan, the last-gasp hair, the foundation that stops at the jawline – less square-jawed warrior than painted sovereign. The male face of authority is never just nature but also theatre, market, meaning and spectacle.
Dr Fay Bound-Alberti is professor of modern history at King’s College London and her book The Face: A Cultural History is published by Allen Lane on 26 February 2026.
