Somewhere between the voluptuous bodies of 2016 and the heroin chic redux of the 2020s, a new beauty ideal has emerged – and it’s all about being undetectable. It started off in the face, as the technology behind surgical procedures hit new advancements, and now it’s migrated down to the rest of the body. “POV: my doctor gave me the best BBL because you wouldn’t have known if I didn’t tell you,” one user writes on TikTok. The post, tagged with #skinnybbl, is part of a growing trend where people are forgoing big, bouncy BBLs in favour of barely there sculpting designed to appear ‘natural’. In October, Kylie Jenner’s best friend, Stassie Karanikolaou, documented her BBL reduction after having expressed regret over the procedure. “Everyone is getting the diaper removed,” one comment with 25K likes joked on her post. 

The skinny BBL is the quiet luxury of cosmetic surgery, less about volume and more about being a seamless lift that’s invisible. “From what I’ve seen, this ass looks nice, lifted and smaller,” Karanikolaou reported after her reduction operation. It’s also a signpost of a broader moment in which algorithms, politics, gender ideals and our collective obsession with ‘effortless’ optimisation are rewriting beauty.

After moving to Miami in 2024, Shay, 25, thought about getting a BBL constantly. “I’d go back and forth with myself,” she says. “The thought of it going out of style and people telling me not to do it… I thought, maybe they’re right. I tried going to the gym and working out, but eventually I decided to take the easy way out.” Shay previously underwent a rhinoplasty and a breast augmentation while living in Arizona in 2023, but “those were minor upgrades”. Miami, a renowned plastic surgery destination, played a role in her decision, in addition to her “toxic” Instagram feed.

“I feel like Miami has influenced me to just better myself. Everything I’ve done cosmetically is to upgrade myself. My nose wasn’t drastic, my boobs were. [With] my skinny BBL, I did the most minimalist fat transfer. I didn’t think my hips and butt needed to be drastic. I like to be able to dress myself up and dress myself down.” Despite agonising over her decision, Shay didn’t tell anyone she had gotten a skinny BBL until three days after the procedure. “I think it looks natural enough that people would never guess. But then that’s the worst thing too because I want people to know,” she laughs. Shay describes these contradictory feelings as a “devil and angel fighting” on her shoulders.

Dr Joshua Jacobson, a Beverly Hills-based board-certified plastic surgeon, has seen this play out on his operating table. “Everyone who comes in says they don’t want to look exaggerated, they don’t want to look fake. People don’t want anyone to know that they’ve had anything done; they just want to look better,” he says, adding that Karanikolaou’s surgery has been a catalyst for more people coming in to reduce theirs. “It’s become a lot more common.”

Beauty critic Jessica DeFino describes the tension between getting procedures and wanting to go unnoticed as a central contradiction. “The market tells us the body must be optimised, so it’s almost irrelevant if we think other people notice because it’s so deeply internalised. But if we conform to the beauty standard, we don’t focus enough on what we lose existentially. The tangible resources we funnel into the project of algorithmic beauty – our time, money, energy, headspace – are finite. These are resources we use to build our lives, and if we’re using them to build our bodies, there’s a cost in life fulfilment.”

The BBL was and remains a defining symbol of 2010s beauty. The KarJenners played a pivotal role in cementing this standard; an amalgamation of features often associated with Black women and people of colour. Candy-coloured lace front wigs, lips plumped with Juvederm, and the cherry on top being an hourglass figure, emphasised by a large, cosmetically enhanced derriere. This body type led to the normalisation of cosmetic surgery for both celebrities and civilians, simultaneously creating pressure to undergo procedures and (briefly) momentum in the body positivity movement as curvier bodies graced runways and the covers of magazines.

Then, the vibe shifted and it all changed. Kim Kardashian drastically lost 16lb to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress for the 2022 Met Gala, the KarJenners reduced their BBLs, Ozempic took over, the clean girl aesthetic gained popularity, certain people turned against tattoos, and there was a resurgence of ultra-thin ideals, conservative aesthetics and regressive socio-political attitudes shaping our bodies. The result is a more ‘natural’, undetectable beauty becoming more desirable. (Although of course, none of it is actually natural. “What we consider the height of feminine beauty today would not be possible without cosmetic technology,” as DeFino says.)

It’s all connected: looksmaxxing, undetectable face procedures, people wanting more natural-looking veneers, the shift to skinny conservative trends. “What’s happening right now, particularly after the second election of President Donald Trump, is a big anti-woke movement,” DeFino says. “This ends up being anti-Black, anti-working class and anti-disabled people, all of which feed into beauty standards as physical manifestations of systemic oppression.” 

Conservative politics focus on traditional and biological femininity, “which I would say is typically associated with effortlessness,” DeFino continues. “I think it’s very telling that the undetectable era is coming at a time where politically and socially we’re seeing a strong emphasis on the glorification of cisgender women and the demonisation of trans people. That is part of why it’s desirable to have your work look undetectable – it’s because it's a performance of biological womanhood.”

The coronation of the skinny BBL is a sign that we’ve officially moved into a new era of beauty, one that tows the line between algorithmic compliance, gender performance, and a glorification of whiteness. “The skinny BBL is about editing the body to fit the dominant visual grammar of the moment,” as trend forecaster Lizzy Bowring puts it. “The body is shaped not only for in-person perception, but also for how it will be read, compressed, and circulated as an image.” The tragedy isn’t just that artificial beauty is being repackaged as authenticity. It’s that people are being told to be quieter, subtler, and to slowly erase themselves. Ultimately, the more we perfect our image, the less of ourselves remains.