What’s a “Mormon Wife” Supposed to Look Like in 2026?

26.03.2026, 15:23 allure.com

March 2026 was poised to be perhaps the pinnacle of Utah Mormon cultural influence. The fourth season of the Hulu sensation The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives was dropping 10 new episodes of soft waves, plump lips, and perky breasts. And just 10 days later, the latest season of The Bachelorette would premiere on ABC with a Mormon woman—Taylor Frankie Paul, a cast member of SLOMW—at its center for the first time. But last week, what may have been cracks in the picture-perfect presentation of this demographic of Utah women became a major fissure when a 2023 video of Paul throwing metal barstools at her ex-partner, Dakota Mortenson, while her child is in the room surfaced online. Just three days before it was set to premiere, The Bachelorette—at a likely cost of tens of millions of dollars—was entirely cancelled. There are reports from cast members that the filming of season five of SLOMW has been paused. (As of press time, Hulu had not replied to a request for comment.)

Over the last decade, the cultural currency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has risen sharply in the United States, as the Mormon lifestyle bloggers of the 2010s laid the groundwork for the reality show influencers of today. Those young content creators—with their long, shiny hair, mostly modest attire, affiliate links, and several children under five—walked so Paul and her #MomTok compatriots could run (perhaps a little too far). Is this month’s turmoil an indication that the Mormon commerce machine may come to its inevitable end? Or will it now morph once again?

A few weeks ago, I flew to Salt Lake City to report on the powerful 2.0 wave of Utahn beauty influence—timed perfectly to this Big Month for Mormons. I sat down with the cast of SLOMW (minus Paul, who pulled out the day before, and Whitney Leavitt, who is currently performing on Broadway as Roxie Hart in Chicago), visited the med spa of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s Heather Gay, got Utah Curls™, and slurped on a “dirty soda.” This is what I found along Interstate 15—and where I think this aesthetic subculture-turned-juggernaut is headed next.

I've only been in Jessi Draper’s chair for four minutes when she starts telling me about her labiaplasty. “After having a baby, I was like, it's not the same down there. It was hard to wear yoga pants. It was just distracting,” the 33-year-old hairstylist says while twirling a lock of my hair into her signature—and, since 2024, trademarked—“Utah Curls” style. The inner (or, in this case, outer) workings of their genitals may be TMI for the average chat with your hairstylist, but for Draper, this is small talk. In fact, she’s told this story before, on the first season of Hulu’s megahit reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. (Hulu doesn’t release its numbers, but there are rumors that ratings have topped that of The Kardashians.) Getting a labiaplasty—or breast implants, Botox injections, spray tans, or lash extensions—is par for the course in Utah Mormon beauty culture.

We’re in JZ Styles, a 15,000-square foot beauty behemoth that Draper founded in 2016 alongside her father. The salon is nestled in the Pleasant Grove suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah, just down the road from one of the town’s Swig locations, the “dirty soda” shop that skyrocketed to nationwide fame after the show’s premiere. (Mormon doctrine forbids alcohol consumption; it takes no issue, however, with drinking a blend of Diet Coke, flavored syrup, and half-and-half.) This area, which is home to utopian-sounding towns like Thanksgiving Point and American Fork, has more plastic surgeons per capita than Los Angeles, according to a 2017 report published by the Utah Women & Leadership Project. Utah also has more members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) than, well, anywhere else in the United States; approximately 42% of the state’s population identifies as Mormon.

Along with the salon, the building is home to a warehouse—where the SLOMW production company rents out space to shoot the casts’ confessionals—and a store that sells walls of hair extensions, styling products, accessories, and merch, including sweatshirts with words like SAINT, SINNER, and FAME WHORE emblazoned on them. There’s also a crew neck that says BAD AT HAIR, a reference to drama Draper had with co-stars Taylor Frankie Paul, 31, and Demi Engemenn, 31, during season two of the show, when Engemenn allegedly advised Paul to stop seeing Draper for her extensions because she was "bad at hair." Utah Curls™ is printed on the packaging for Draper’s beige and pink curling irons, which come in three sizes—she tells me they sold out in less than 24 hours following season one’s premiere. In the same space is a hair school called JZ Academy; Draper currently has around 50 employees who help her run the place (including her sisters, who serve as the heads of operations, and her mom, who is also a hairstylist, as lead educator). And even though I’m there at 12pm on a random Tuesday in March, six of the salon’s other chairs are filled by young women. All of them are getting blonde highlights.

Even if you haven’t seen The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, you probably know a “Mormon wife” when you see one. If the original modern LDS stereotype was conservative young men in white shirts and black ties (even if you’re not one of the millions who saw The Book of Mormon, you know the image), today’s aesthetic vision of Mormonism is quite the opposite. “You can tell when a girl's from Utah,” Draper tells me. There’s “a lot of blonde bitches here,” her co-star Mikayla Matthews, 25, says later, as we sit in the back office of JZ Styles with Draper and co-star Mayci Neeley, 31. LDS members pioneered the settlement of this state and Utahns, whether they’re Mormon or not, are heavily influenced by the religion’s culture; the restaurant inside of my hotel in downtown Salt Lake City was not serving alcohol, for example. The show’s cast of women, who at some point have all been members of the church, are mostly white with long hair, microbladed eyebrows, Juvéderm-filled lips, and, quite often, pregnant bodies—there are, at the time of publication, 23 children between the seven cast members (we’re not counting Engemenn, who is no longer filming the show).

Over the sounds of a few high-powered hair dryers, six of the show’s current cast members tell me that the area’s obsession with aesthetics isn’t just an overblown media headline. I believe them since I’ve now seen the infamous aesthetics-focused billboards that line Interstate 15, the major highway that cuts through Utah County, with my own two eyes—they advertise for plastic surgeons, med spas, teeth whitening services, hair extensions, and even Draper’s own salon. “I think that if people assume that this is a vain state, they would be correct,” says co-star Layla Taylor, 25.

Each of the SLOMW cast members have spoken openly about their aesthetic work, ranging from neuromodulators to breast implants to the aforementioned labiaplasty. After filming season one, Taylor gifted herself a breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, a tummy tuck, Botox, and filler in her lips, chin, and jaw. “I had kids young and I love my babies to death but they screwed up my body and I wanted to feel hot again,” she said on Page Six’s Virtual Reali-Tea podcast at the time. “I’m single. I want a new husband one day, so I had to revamp!”

Some of them have documented their experiences on camera—both for the show and for their personal social media. In 2022, Taylor Frankie Paul, the fallen Bachelorette, made the women’s “MomTok” group famous for outing her swinging scandal. In season four, which premiered earlier this month, she gets a breast augmentation. It’s her second in less than four years. I was scheduled to interview Paul at JZ Styles, but the day before I arrived I was told she would no longer be there. We didn’t get a chance to discuss her revision—or anything else. During a confessional interview, she said she wanted to get a “touch up” after having another child and also for her upcoming appearance as the lead on The Bachelorette. “I think I’m about to be in a lot of dresses,” she says. “If you know me, I’m not normally in dresses, so I just kind of want to feel good in them.”

For the stars of SLOMW, telling the world about where and what on their bodies they’ve had poked and prodded feels natural. Like their moral obligation, even. “We're not pushing for people to get plastic surgery,” Matthews says. “It's just like, ‘Hey, if this is something you want to do, there's no shame, there's no judgment. This is my experience for your information, for your knowledge.’”

“That's how it should be,” adds Neeley. “You see certain celebrities and [they say] ‘I've never done anything.’ I think that's why we like to be open about it too, because I'm like, it's so weird to act like you are perfect. We know we're not.”

Neeley, Affleck, and Matthews pose at JZ Styles, the birthplace of Utah Curls.

When Allure traveled to Utah in 2017 to investigate that earlier phenomenon of LDS influence, we learned that while there’s no Mormon doctrine that outright says “thou shall be hot,” there are messages regarding a woman’s appearance that filter through the church. The LDS website even has a section on “Dress and Appearance” for its young missionaries. “From a young age, we’re taught that our bodies are sacred temples where we make covenants with God. It’s about self-confidence from the inside out. Inner beauty is really important, too,” Dancing with the Stars cast member (and erstwhile blogger) Witney Carson told writer Alice Gregory at the time.

“It's said that the harder you work as a missionary, the hotter your wife."

Some are a bit less eloquent than Carson in addressing the value that the religion can put on appearance, particularly that of a woman: “It's said that the harder you work as a missionary, the hotter your wife,” says Julie de Azevedo, PhD, a Salt Lake City–based psy