Columnist
‘It’s time to talk about the bottom line. Not the financial one – the cheeky one you’re sitting on’
When I was growing up, skinniness was inniness. To keep our bottoms perfectly pert, we girls lived on a daily diet of half a celery frond. Our obsession with thinness meant we wouldn’t even cook with thick-bottomed saucepans.
But now, big bottoms are in vogue. A full derrière is de rigueur. Yep, all that dieting was for nothing (which, ironically, was all we ate from the 70s on. ‘I’ll have a cup of skimmed air, please.’).
Today’s pin-ups are of a peachier persuasion: think Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, and curvaceous co. My girlfriends are swapping their organ-squishing control tights for padded pants to get a more rounded silhouette – like Wonderbras for bums.
But some are taking the fad too far. A woman in my Zumba class recently had buttock implant surgery. She disappeared from the gym for some months and reappeared with an inbuilt bustle. She now stands in front of me in class, which is quite handy, as it provides a ledge upon which to place my water bottle.
In the changing rooms afterwards, we gathered round for a debrief. She described how she’d had fat removed from her upper thighs using liposuction, which was then injected into her buttocks. The ‘Brazilian butt lift’ or the ‘Kim Kardashian’ took about two hours under general anaesthetic.
Personally, I think you’d have to be loco to use lipo on your thighs. What if the medical hoover got turned up too high? Your vagina could become askew – and no woman wants to be referred to as a ‘little bit on the side’.
As my classmates prodded her fleshy cushions, many voiced a longing for their own ‘rear of the year’. At this juncture, I thought it might be timely to point out that bottom implants have an alarming number of post-operative complications making them, literally, a bum steer. Sign those surgery forms and you might end up with strangers laughing at your lumpy, lopsided rear – and all you could do is turn the other cheek (well, what you have left of it).
Apparently, my bottom isn’t all I have to worry about. As we disc
