How Did Butt Skincare Become a Thing?
Sheet masks aren't just for you face anymore, here's why.
There is officially a sheet mask for everything, including your butt. From sheet masks, to serums, and scrubs, beauty brands are offering all things skincare, for all parts of your body. Want glowing cheeks as dewy as the ones on your face? There’s a mask for that. Want to detoxify your derriere? There’s a mask for that. Want to give your booty and firming boost? You guessed it, there’s a mask for that.
Perhaps this tush oriented trend is the result of the increased amount of time we now spend sitting on our butts at home. Or perhaps the past year having been spent largley alone by many simply resulted in a new sort of self-awareness. Either way, when it comes to skincare we tend to focus all our energy on the face, but a combination of pro-booty, body positivity, and wellness-related trends seems to be changing that.
Referred to by some as “intimate skincare,” the idea of slapping a sheet mask on your rear might sound fringe. However, the butt mask business has actually been booming for several years now. Back in 2017, ex-fitness entrepreneur Sylwia Wiesenberg launched the booty-skin-centric brand Bawdy Beauty. Wisenburg describes herself as "butt-obsessed," and was among the first to offer a range of skin products, none of which go on your face. What started out as a single butt mask has evolved into balms, clay masks, sheet masks, washes, oils, sculpting tools, sticks, and more. A number of other products and brands have also emerged, catering to the delicate skin of the derriere and targeting things like acne, elasticity, and smoothing and tightening.
What makes a brand like Bawdy Beauty truly interesting though (beside the impressive array of booty treatments) is the consumer base backing it. In 2019 Emma Chiu, global director of JWT Intelligence (an analytics and data forecasting group) told The New York Times that her office was noticing “a boom in what we’re calling inclusive wellness.” According to Chiu, inclusive wellness “includes every aspect of yourself and every part of yourself.” The idea that we should be considering and caring for every part of our body is not unfamiliar. The millions of body positive infographics that float around Instagram, sentiments from wellness influencers, and online mental health advocates reiterate this message daily.
That same year in 2019, Brazilian fashion designer Karoline Vitto also entered the body positivity conversation. With a visual emphasis on parts of the body women are usually encouraged to hide like armpit fat, stomach rolls, or love handles, Vitto was the first of what is now a good number of designers sartorially interpreting body positivity this way. The attention being paid by beauty brands to caring for previously neglected body parts echoes Vitto’s sentiment of holistically celebrating one’s body.
It’s hard to imagine now that butts were ever considered undesirable, but it's important to note when trying to understand this trend. Before Niki Minaj re-mixed “I Like Big Butts” into Anaconda, or the Kardashians started taking #belfies, or Megan Thee Stallion dropped “Body,” butts were not appreciated. The heroin chic era of high fashion, spearheaded by images of Kate Moss and other white waifish models was not curve friendly. Thank goodness it ended. Along with pop culture's acceptance of full figures and the official addition of "bootylicious" into the dictionary, butts are now worth celebrating and even pampering with skincare.
Today, with help from social media and progressive female designers, women are being encouraged to radically love their bodies. It makes sense this would manifest also in the beauty business, seeing fashion and cosmetics have always parallelled each other as industries. The convergence of these shifting attitudes in fashion with wellness professionals, body positive influencers, and pop culture is what makes butt skincare products more than a fleeting trend. So while you may giggle at the idea of putting a sheet mask on your behind, it may not be long before you’re giving it a go yourself.
