Macaroni penguin is a shallow scrape in the ground which may be lined with some pebbles, stones, or grass, or nestled in a clump of tussock grass (on South Georgia Island). Nests are densely packed, ranging from around 66 cm apart in the middle of a colony to 86 cm at the edges. A fertile macaroni penguin will lay two eggs each breeding season. The first egg to be laid weighs , 61–64% the size of the second, and is extremely unlikely to survive. The two eggs together weigh 4.8% of the mother's body weight; the composition of an egg is 20%
Macaroni (fashion) of "the Macaroni Club, which is composed of all the traveled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses". The "club" was not a formal one; the expression was particularly used to characterize fops who dressed in high fashion with tall, powdered wigs with a chapeau bras on top that could only be removed on the point of a sword. The shop of engravers and printsellers Mary and Matthew Darly in the fashionable West End of London sold their sets of satirical "macaroni" caricature prints, published between 1771 and 1773. The new Darly shop became known as "the Macaroni Print-Shop".