It all started with the most famous butt in the world: Kim Kardashian West’s. As the Kardashians rose to world domination in the 2010s, an impossible new beauty ideal was born.The ‘slim thick’ figure (aka the tiny waist, flat stomach and big ass we’ve all seen plastered over our social media feeds for the past few years), became the new unrealistic body shape we all started striving for.
Soon, everywhere you looked, a perfect peach emoji bum was popping out of gym wear or bodycon dresses, influencing our gym and cosmetic surgery habits worldwide. We had a whole new shape to try and fail to attain and beat ourselves up over. Now you didn’t just need to be stick thin, as unhealthy '90s and '00s body trends encouraged. You needed to be thin AND have curves in all the right places. So, near on impossible then.
The number of women trying to achieve this through cosmetic surgery grew and grew and the Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) became the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world - where fat is taken from one part of the body and injected into the ass.
But then came horror story after horror story of procedures gone wrong. In 2017, Dr Mark Mofid, a leading BBL surgeon based in California and a group of other surgeons published a paper in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal that revealed that one in 3,000 BBLs result in death, making it the world’s most dangerous cosmetic procedure.
More recently, we’ve been hearing stories of celebrities famous for their big bums turning their back on the look: Rapper Cardi B had her butt implants taken out last year and warned her fans off getting a BBL. Model and actor Blac Chyna recently got hers removed, apparently as part of some kind of spiritual journey, Page Six reports.
There’s even rumours that Kim Kardashian had her alleged implants (which she’s always denied having) allegedly removed. Whether she had them in the first place is still a mystery, but she did try and prove she hadn’t by X-Raying her ass to prove it was au naturel. That hasn’t stopped voyeurs deciding her bum has changed shape so drastically she must have reversed a BBL.
Surgeons who raked it in performing procedures in the first place are still laughing all the way to bank as reports circulate that New Yorkers are paying $25,000 to have their BBLs sucked out.
So does this mean that’s it for the BBL - which would be a good thing - or is it also a sign that fashion has come for the curvy bum? Thank God if it means an end to dangerous procedures and women desperately trying to turn themselves into a cartoon-like figures. But if the reason behind the shift is to do with a return to the thin ideal then we’re just jumping from one worrying trend to another.
If fashion is moving back towards the straight down look, what does that mean for the naturally, non-medically enhanced curvy bottom? Is this change just yet another stick to beat women with?The rise in Ozempic, the diabetes drug fueling a dangerous weight-loss obsession, suggests curves are, once again, ‘out’. The New York Post’s notorious headline at the end of last year: ‘Bye-bye booty: Heroin chic is back’ was a dangerous way of trivialising a return to another worryingly unhealthy trend.
It’s already so difficult for women to be happy with themselves when we’re fed constant unrealistic beauty standards. A body type isn’t a trend and shouldn’t be ‘in’ or ‘out’ of fashion. If this shift away from the Kardashian booty means fewer dangerous BBLs then that’s a step in the right direction. Otherwise let’s not worry about whether our backside is the right shape for the times. If the BBL is over it shows trends come and go, so we should try not to care anyway.