NEW YORK – If you spend enough time around the very rich these days, it is clear. People did not use to look like this because people cannot look like this naturally.

Models in a Paris Fashion Week show for the luxury brand Matieres Fecales in March caricatured the 1 per cent by wearing prosthetics that resembled post-op faces, including grotesque under-eye bulges, skin pulled up from their temples and lips that appeared unnaturally inflated and stitched at the edges.

American animated comedy series South Park (1997 to present) depicted American politician Kristi Noem with a face so Botoxed, it melts off and scurries away. From the Met Gala to the Oscars to every red carpet in between, these rich faces are everywhere.

A “rich face” is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions and plumped with filler or implants or a person’s own grafted fat.

Once, this face belonged to a villainous class of elites in sci-fi depictions of a dystopian future. In the movie The Hunger Games (2012), residents of the capital city who revel in luxury and excess at the expense of other impoverished districts often wear sculpted, altered faces.

In the series Doctor Who (1963 to present), a wealthy socialite from the distant future goes through so many facelifts that she becomes little more than a stretched face on a thin sheet of skin mounted on a frame, maintained with constant moisturiser.

The ultrawealthy seem less and less concerned with hiding their excesses. They are richer than ever, and figures like media personality Lauren Sanchez Bezos and President Donald Trump give them permission to flaunt their neo-Gilded Age spoils.