A quote long attributed to Catherine Deneuve is, “At a certain age, a woman must choose between her face and her ass.” Deneuve turns 82 this week, and while I’m certain both parts of her remain stunning, the premise of the quote — that striving for thinness will show on the face in gaunt cheeks and lined skin, while retaining the fat needed to keep a face youthful risks unwanted ass expansion — has become obsolete. For one thing, the beauty and cosmetic-surgery industries have spent decades innovating products and procedures to ensure that any woman with the time and money to invest can keep both face and ass in aging lockstep by way of lifts, fillers and resurfacing treatments. But perhaps more important is that having junk in the trunk is no longer seen as a dreaded marker of middle age.Instead, a confrontation with normative beauty standards has put women’s rear ends at the center of a cultural and commercial sea change. Butts are big business: Products and services including glute-focused workouts, padding-and-lifting shapewear, and athleisure pants with built-in wedgies have proliferated, and butt augmentation is among the fastest-growing subsets of cosmetic surgery. Demand for liposuction, butt implants and fat-grafting procedures like the Brazilian butt lift has grown dramatically since 2000; as of 2023, the market for butt-augmentation procedures was valued at $2.81 billion, and is expected to hit $13.23 billion by 2030. The category of products formulated to firm, plump and smooth a part of the body you rarely see continues to grow, with masks, serums, spa treatments, and what’s called “holecare” peddling via social media to younger generations that have never known a time when butts weren’t celebrated.
But this particular glow-up is so significant in part because it wasn’t very long ago that the prevailing white, Western beauty standard believed the ideal ass to be barely any ass at all. For fashion and beauty industries that treated the female form as a ceaseless work in progress, the butt was just another feature we were expected to make an enemy of. If asses were acknowledged at all, it was only in the context of workouts like “Buns of Steel” meant to keep them under control.
The category of products formulated to firm, plump and smooth a part of the body you rarely see continues to grow, with masks, serums, spa treatments, and what’s called “holecare” peddling via social media to younger generations that have never known a time when butts weren’t celebrated.
This began to change in the 1990s, when pop culture became a touch less white and the media mainstream was reshaped by women whose very embodiment challenged the status quo with a simple question: What if butts have been awesome all along? Janet Jackson, Salt-N-Pepa, Jennifer Lopez, En Vogue, Rosie Perez and Selena Quintanilla were among the celebrities who exposed the fashion world’s racialized disdain for a conspicuous can; rap’s growing popularity with white audiences, meanwhile, further contradicted conventional less-is-more wisdom. Booty ambassadors like LL Cool J and Sir Mix-A-Lot led a charge of extravagant, infectious rump shaking that crossed over to pop radio and MTV. Butts were suddenly out there — and though it didn’t happen overnight, they were leading a pop-culture paradigm shift.
The inflection point for the fashion and beauty industry came with the double-barreled ascent of Jennifer Lopez, who conquered both the pop charts and the big screen in the latter part of the ’90s. Mainstream fashion magazines whose target audience was white women had for decades filed “butt” under the general category of “fat” and engaged with treating any detectable ass as a sartorial problem to be solved with cleverly cut and inconspicuously tailored pieces. Lopez’s ubiquity confronted them with two suboptimal choices: either acknowledge a history of racial homogeneity or pretend to have always been butt boosters.
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They ended up going with a third thing that managed to be worse: They pronounced that butts were “in,” and presumably counted on being able to make sure they went out just as fast. But though pop culture continued pathologizing bigger butts (in the now-classic 2000 hit “Bring It On,” the unremarkably sized ass of one of the Rancho Carne Toros is mocked mercilessly) and the fashion industry aimed to ignore them, butts didn’t go anywhere but up. In the early 2000s, butts were a bona fide focal point: Brands like rapper Nelly’s Apple Bottom Jeans were cut specifically to fit big-booty Judys, Juicy Couture slapped its name across the seat of its pricey velour sweatpants, and low-rise jeans and thong underwear made the “whale tail” a new way to show skin.
Many creators of butt-specific skincare capitalize on past erasure and marginalization to frame their products as defiant and reclamatory.
The modern era of ass obsession was ushered in by three women whose butts were, for better or worse, entwined with their careers. There was Beyoncé, whose warning “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly” on the Destiny’s Child hit “Bootylicious” was both a clapback to body criticism and an affirmation of the big butt as an engine of empowerment. There was Serena Williams, whose dominance in the historically white sport of tennis rendered her athletic build fundamentally suspect, subjecting her to an objectifying scrutiny and racist caricature reminiscent of “Hottentot Venus” Sarah Baartman’s. And there was Kim Kardashian, whose reality stardom and internet-breaking ass normalized the consumer pursuit of bodily perfection as a marker of status rather than a source of shame.
Glossy magazines were offering up tips for “butt beauty” as early as 2008, but the image-based social media platforms that arrived over the next decade made butts an aspirational phenomenon and emphasized that skincare woes below the waist (acne, dryness, uneven tone and more) are no less deserving of care than those above the neck. The emergence of “wellness” and “self-care” as beauty buzz phrases has been key to capturing the zeitgeist: many creators of butt-specific skincare capitalize on past erasure and marginalization to frame their products as defiant and reclamatory. Products like Truly’s Buns of Glowry exfoliating scrub, Megababe’s Bidet Bar soap and Le Tush Butt Mask, Anese’s That Booty Tho resurfacing scrub and Coco Fesse’s Twerk Creme elevate the butt as an underdog whose time has at last come.
But now that the ass has arrived, so has a new set of aesthetic imperatives. Where there was once a single, overarching question — Is my butt an acceptable size? — there is now a checklist of more specific ones: Is it smooth enough? Soft enough? Blemish-free enough? Beauty-review sites create buzz for products that earn them commissions via affiliate marketing with insistent headlines: “Do You Have a Butt Care Routine? You Should,” “Are You Being Kind to Your Butt?” “Is Butt Skincare the New Red Light Therapy?” And butt-care evangelists like Bawdy Beauty’s Sylwia Wiesenberg are enough of a novelty to become big names in themselves; in 2019, Nylon featured Bawdy’s butt sheet masks in a behind-the-scenes catwalk-prep video, dubbing Wiesenberg the “fairy butt-mother” of New York Fashion Week.
Wiesenberg has been trying for the past few years to make “Butts are the new face” happen, and its failure to catch on isn’t just because it’s factually inaccurate. Butts are, after all, the indoor kids of the epidermis. And yet the phrase is correct in the sense that butt care, like facial skincare, is marketed to a largely female audience with promises of newness and rejuvenation and often trumpeting trending hero ingredients like glycolic acid and niacinamide. Butt skincare is also positioned as a daily regimen rather than an occasional focus; as with the 10 and 12-step routines that Korean skincare has made dominant in the U.S., the idea is that butts require consistent and vigilant effort to maintain.
Wiesenberg has been trying for the past few years to make “Butts are the new face” happen, and its failure to catch on isn’t just because it’s factually inaccurate. Butts are, after all, the indoor kids of the epidermis.
Embracing a previously neglected women’s body part has never stopped beauty brands from pitching products to improve that part’s appearance. (I can’t be the only one who remembers when Dove’s Real Beauty campaign drew attention to a study that revealed a lack of “armpit confidence” among young women and shortly thereafter introduced a deodorant that promised to “turn armpits into underarms.”) The rise of butt-centric skincare is at least an equal-opportunity gambit, designed to fuel self-consciousness about previously unconsidered flaws among the butts of all genders. In the past two years, champions of gender-inclusive “holecare” include FutureMethod, whose slogan “butt health is gut health” expands the market for prebiotics, and Asset+, which touts itself as “the first butt wellness company” and sells, in addition to a $79 “Hole Essentials” bundle comprising anal cleanser and serum, a set of “Butt Art Postcards.”
The beauty industry is currently in a protracted slump that’s been attributed to everything from post-pandemic skincare fatigue to a surfeit of choice that makes brand loyalty a thing of the past. What that means is that the levers of body insecurity and shame that power the beauty industry are soon going to start churning anew, generating fresh flaws to focus on and a revitalized attitude with which to sell us eternal dissatisfaction with body parts that were never meant to be quite this scrutinized. Whatever comes next, hold onto your butts.
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