What Hair Spray Does Donald Trump Use, and Other Important Unsolved Mysteries

Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron may not be especially strong political allies—especially after Trump attacked the French president on Twitter last fall—but there’s one point on which they could probably agree, and that’s their beauty routines. More specifically, the attention they pay to their grooming. In 2017, a makeup artist filed 26,000 euros in expenses attributed to Macron over the course of three months, giving the impression he may be a secret Sephora junkie. And, though a new investigation by the New York Times doesn’t attribute a price tag to Trump’s beauty escapades, it certainly gives a healthy snapshot of what the president’s daily beauty rituals must look like.

Let’s start with skincare. The president’s specific tangerine hue has led him to be compared, alternately, to a Cheeto or an oompa loompa (Alec Baldwin told the Times it alternates between “‘Mark Rothko orange’ and a ‘slightly paler orange crush’”), but a senior Trump official said it’s simply a matter of “good genes.” Alright then.

That’s not to say Donald Trump doesn’t try to flaunt his assets. He uses a translucent powder (specifically not a bronzer) prior to television appearances; several aids, per the Times, said he “has long been self-sufficient in matters of grooming.” He can be critical of his own appearance, leading him to prefer low- or naturally lit settings in and around the White House.

But there’s still the matter of how he achieves his orange “glow,” as it’s repeatedly called throughout the story. Omarosa Manigault postulated that it’s a tanning bed in her tell-all memoir, but no sign of a tanning bed has been spotted around the White House. A dermatologist who has treated White House officials (including, she said, Trump White House officials) told the Times the look is more consistent with a self-tanner, though his skin shows signs of sun damage (in addition to the rosacea he suffers from). So the skin, it seems, will remain a mystery, locked in the proverbial top drawer of the president’s vanity table.

The hair, however, is a bit more decipherable. It all starts with Head & Shoulders shampoo and an air dry—got to avoid heat damage, you know—while he watches television (Fox & Friends, probably?) and hangs out on Twitter (probably firing off tweet storms at foreign dignitaries). He combs it—“forward, so it reaches down past his nose, and then he folds it back, and then he sprays it,” hair stylist Losi told the Daily Beast in 2015. (She began styling his hair in 1997.) Trump is given to offering tours of the White House, and, reportedly, his collection of hair sprays is on full display in his bathroom. (The Times did not say which brands, which is honestly an important detail that’s lacking here.) That’s one more mystery for the books.