Forget thigh gaps, there’s a new body image obsession seeping its way into women and girls’ consciousness: hip dips.
Never heard of them? Neither had we, but a quick Google search throws up hundreds of thousands of results of tips to get rid of them or people discussing surgical intervention.
Hip dips are common. It’s when the top of your thigh curves inwards, just before the hip bone.
While this is a reality for women of all shapes and sizes, it’s causing a lot of body image anxiety for people.
That’s why fitness blogger Carys Gray, from Cardiff, Wales, is calling for women to love their so-called hip dips.
Posting to her 240,000 followers, she explained she was surprised and saddened to hear that this body part causes women and girls so much body anxiety.
“As you can see from this picture and many of my other pictures I have preeeeeetty large ‘hip dips’...,” she explained.
“This is where my leg/hip area comes in just before my quad starts.. I thought these lil dips were unique to me until I read... about how they’re actually a huge insecurity to loads of women!!
“I then went on to google hip dips and read all about how they’re seen as a bad thing for women and some people even go as far as to have fat injected into them to smooth them out.
“WELL I sure as hell wasn’t about to add another thing onto my insecurity list.”
She added: “If anyone else has these cute ass hip dips then you should rock them.. For 20 years I’ve picked at areas of my body I hate but not once did I pick up on these! A few years ago I would have read that article and suddenly felt insecure and wanted to change them. Now I don’t give a poo what other people think looks good on women or not. I think they’re cool. And yes growing my quads 17483 times bigger has probably made the hip dips even more prominent but quads are cool too.”
Gray’s post struck a chord with many of her followers, gaining almost 18,000 likes.
One user commented: “I never thought of them as the ugliest things in existence, but they have bothered me for some time.... Ever since I saw this, every time I look at my hip dips they start to look more cool and unique to me. Although they’re a bit bigger than what I’m okay with, I don’t want to eliminate them anymore thanks to this post.
Sadly this obsessions is nothing new. Clinical psychologist Dr. Barbara Greenberg first blogged about it for HuffPost back in 2013, asking: “Why is it that our teen girls are moving from body part to body part?”
She wrote: “Teen girls are afraid of having a hip dip. What’s a hip dip? It’s a slight curve on the outside of the upper thighs. The curve goes inward. Teen girls are working on that part of their body too. There are exercises and diets, of course, to try to get rid of this body feature. This hip dip may be a natural part of a young woman’s anatomy or result from the clothing that they are wearing, but nonetheless, many are just not having it and are talking about ways to get rid of it.”
Denise Hatton, chief executive of YMCA England and Wales, a founding partner of the Be Real Campaign for body confidence, reassured women that having hip dips is perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of.
“Body confidence is an issue that affects both men and women and our campaign is about promoting the diversity of shapes and sizes that exist. It is also about ensuring people understand it is more important to be healthy and happy than trying to have the ‘perfect body,’” she told HuffPost UK.
“We know 70% of adult women have felt pressure from television and magazines to have this idealised body and the recent focus on ‘hip dips’ is another example of a body craze that is potentially damaging to long-term health.
“We cannot understand why this is becoming such an obsession when hip dips are normal, natural and beautiful.”
