Tweakments to build your bum? Thanks but I’ll pass

Bum-building tweakments are very much in fashion but I have to confess –  I have a problem with them. The thing is, fashions in backside-beauty change with the decades – mad but true – from hourglass and curvy in the 1950s, Twiggy-skinny in the Sixties, natural-slender in the Seventies, athletic in the Eighties, waif-like in the Nineties and on a serious growth-curve since the mid-Noughties, driven by the Kardashians and showing no signs of letting up.

However much I can appreciate the beauty of a curvy bottom, my mindset has never progressed from the  ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ era (2002), so I find it hard to get my head around the idea of wanting, er, amplification.

Having said that, I know just how popular these treatments are – so what’s out there? Here goes.

Muscle-building

Creating a sensational set of glutes that will also protect your back, help you stand up straighter, balance better, and climb stairs with ease usually takes a great deal of consistent effort in the gym and more squats and lunges than you’d care to count.

I’m happy to put in the hours in the gym, but if you want the short cut, there are several types of muscle-toning technology, which use either electrical muscle stimulation (Cutera TruSculpt Flex) or high-intensity focused electromagnetic frequencies, aka HIFEM technology, to supercharge muscles by making them contract at astonishing speeds, far faster and more thoroughly than our brains could ever make them do.

This might sound like science fiction gone mad, but the latest devices like the EMSculpt from BTL Aesthetics and the StimSure from Cynosure have plenty of clinical proof that they work. I know lots of practitioners find that their patients love these treatments, but the ones I’ve tried haven’t made a noticeable difference.

Pump up the volume

If you’re seeking smoother, shapelier contours for your bottom there’s a new injectable filler to consider. It’s not a hyaluronic acid-based filler (those CAN be used on the bum but they work out very expensive) but a collagen-stimulating filler called Lanluma. The collagen-stimulating element in Lanluma is poly-l-lactic acid, which is mixed up with water and injected, and once the water in the mix has been absorbed by the body over the next day or two, the poly-l-lactic acid goes to work, stimulating the fibroblasts in the area to create more collagen, which develops in volume over the next 30-90 days.

Where do these injections go? They’re usually done on the upper part of the glutes, to give a nice, raised roundness to the area – or perhaps at the sides of the glutes if you have ‘hip dips’ and want them filled out (I have hip dips but have never thought of them as a problem). There’s a video showing Lanluma treatment here.

What about surgical butt-lifts?

I’d prefer to gloss over the BBL – the Brazilian Buttock Lift – except it’s such a well-known thing that I can’t ignore it. This involves extracting fat from your tummy or thighs and re-injecting it into your backside, so it’s a surgical fat transfer procedure involving liposuction, i.e. surgical removal of fat. It is considered such a high-risk procedure that the members of BAAPS (the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons) decided four years ago that they would no longer offer it, because of the mortality rate associated with the procedure (1:3,000).

What goes wrong? If the extracted fat is injected deep into the muscle tissue and lower down on the buttocks, there’s a risk that it can be injected into the deep veins. If that happens, a blob of fat travels off round the body’s blood system into the lungs and, yes, that can kill. If you’re dead-set on having this surgery, make very sure that your surgeon is an expert at fat-grafting and has carried out a lot of these procedures successfully, and be very aware of the risks.