STERLING, Va.-Makeup artist Adrienne Gray was dotting a damp sponge across the cheekbones of her tutorial model. For 30 minutes, Gray had laden Jayme Franklin, co-founder of a conservative lifestyle brand, with two dozen cosmetics in as many steps: foundation and primer and bronzer and eye shadow and glitter and blush and highlighter and heaps of concealer.

"It's all in the blend," she said.

She layered product upon product like a Renaissance painter, placing each in patchwork plots. The two kinds of blush on Franklin's cheeks blared like rosy stoplights, sending the 60 women who attended Gray's makeup "masterclass" at the Trump National Golf Club into various degrees of unease.

"Do not freak out," Gray, 37, instructed as she smoothed over Franklin's cheeks. "I know everybody in this airplane is not worried about the landing, but let's just not be too scared."

The onlookers trust Gray because MAGA's leading ladies do. She did Karoline Leavitt's makeup for both of this year's White House Correspondents Association dinners. She did Bettina Trump's for a family get-together. Her most regular client is Lara Trump, who seeks out Gray for state dinners and hits on Fox News. Fox and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.

The nation's semiquincentennial and its attendant galas had been a high season for Gray's glam. So had the UFC fight at the White House in June. Many Trumpworld women seek out Gray's services ahead of important meetings in Washington.

So on a steamy August evening, she was committed to teaching fans how to achieve her look-one that can stand up to the lights of a studio or the glare of a camera, sure, but also bears the aesthetic signatures of the modern MAGA woman.

"It's not your everyday Hailey-Bieber-clean-girl makeup," she tells the room. "I'd be happy to do that too, but, this is the niche."

Babydoll lashes, pouty lips and chiseled contours, repeated across the faces of Trumpworld's women like a uniform. It is one element of Trump 2.0 femininity, which values cinched waists, high heels and "Mar-a-Lago face," the colloquial shorthand for surgical interventions to tighten and fill. "MAGA makeup" has been wielded as a pejorative among political opponents and parodied on TikTok with streaky spray tan and densely lined eyes.

Gray dismisses the criticism. "Conservative women love feeling beautiful," she told me. "I just think it's just a core pillar of femininity, and girls on the right really value that."

It's also a core pillar of getting ahead in Trump's Washington, where style and substance matter to a pageant-loving president. The women who'd paid nearly $250 for this evening with Gray weren't bored housewives-they were Trump administration staffers, conservative influencers and Republican PR consultants. One woman from the Palm Beach Republican Club had made a special trip to the president's D.C.-area golf club for Gray's tutorial.

To master these skills, in other words, isn't merely a hobby. It's a means of professional development.

The reception room inside the golf club was awash in pink-tablecloths, peonies, lip-shaped gummies and Gray herself, flitting around in a hot-pink skirt suit. There were tiny bottles of Diet Coke and well-done sliders as a nod to the president's taste; french fries in paper "girl dinner" sleeves in a nod to feminine memes. The women, nearly all of them white, watched Gray's demonstration as they sipped from rosé poured with an edible sugar kiss.

Gray has a fine arts background and started doing professional makeup after college, but she has gotten this gig, in part, because of her proximity to the MAGA elite. Before founding her beauty business earlier this year, she'd done conservative commentary on Fox News and Newsmax, where her own glam garnered greenroom envy. She's a member of Trump National, which is where she first met Leavitt. She did makeup for Elizabeth Pipko, Lara Trump's former RNC spokeswoman, which led her to Lara.

As she walked through Franklin's "medium glam" look, Gray revealed some tricks of the trade. "Mature" faces should avoid shimmer, since it can make them look older. Concealer is good for a lot of things, like priming eyelids and reshaping lip liner, but it can't fix wrinkles. She rattled off the products she likes-Patrick Ta blush, Charlotte Tilbury bronzer-and told the women they could trust her recommendations. "In my line of work, I'm not getting brand deals," she says. She's about to launch her own cosmetics line: 1600 Beauty, a nod to her start in Trump's Washington.

After an hour of effort, Franklin had her smoky eye, rosy cheeks and glossed lips. Gray sealed it in with a translucent finishing powder. "It is basically like an airbrush filter," she explained as she tapped a puff along Franklin's jaw.

Gray was right. Stepping back to reveal the end result, Franklin looked undeniably MAGA, but softened.

Franklin admired herself in a hand-held mirror. "I wish Adrienne, like, lived in my house," she said.