Martha Stewart, 78, Shows Us How a Swimsuit Thirst Trap Is Done

Scram, Gen Z. Beat it, Millennials. Martha Stewart is half-submerged in her Hamptons Pool wearing nothing but a scrap of fabric, a fist-full of diamonds, and a perfect duck face. The Martha Stewart who wore sensible androgynous gardening smocks is dead. Meet 2020 Martha Stewart: glistening mermaid and Instagram THOT (That Home-Living-Expert Over There.) Her cooking is mouthwatering. And now, so is she. Long may she reign. 

For the uninitiated, a “thirst trap” is an image posted online in which the subject is both obviously trying to look sexy, and obviously succeeding at looking sexy. Here, Stewart reinvents the form. She was born before the end of World War II, but she has the influencer soul of someone who doesn’t know the name “George Bush.” 

In her Tuesday evening post, a masterclass in looking hot online, Stewart stares down at the ideal smoldering 45-degree angle. Her lips? Frosted. Her eyelids? Shimmering. Her hair? Beach-y waves. Her ears? Dripping in what look like art-deco diamond studs. The water behind her is the glittering turquoise of an Apple screensaver from 2005. She looks like she’s exhaling 1,000 cigarette but, like, in the time before people knew cigarettes were bad. The overall effect can only be described as three-water-droplets emoji. 

The true adventure begins in the caption, which reads like a combination of a DIY house project handbook and a 1950s erotic novel. “It fit in a long narrow space between the house and the property line,” she writes of her pool, which she notes she built thirty years ago. “I made it extra deep for diving and with no protruding steps so we could really race the length without worrying about obstacles. After all these years, it is a fun place to swim!!!” 

The woman who is synonymous with domestic perfection has outdone herself. This time her triumph is not an easy breakfast quinoa or an autumnal table-scape or even a massive TV, print, and merchandizing brand. The triumph is Martha herself, proclaiming that yes, she may have a swimming pool older than the country of Croatia, but after all these years, she’s still a fun place to swim. 

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.