Can we put away the bums already?

Of all the ludicrous fashion trends in recent years, giant wedgies on the beach surely has to be up there with the worst, writes Lucy Carne. Can’t we just go back to covering up a little more?

Please, can we put away the bottoms?

Yes, I’m temporarily shelving my three university degrees and near 20 years in journalism to talk about bums. Bare with me (I’m so sorry).

If you’ve been on an Australian beach recently you will know that bikini briefs are receding faster than polar ice caps.

Everywhere you look, the wrong type of cheeks are smiling back. It’s so prolific-a-swimwear trend, I clench at the thought of all the weeping melanomas being painfully cut from women’s buttocks in a few years.

The most recent season of Bachelor in Paradise triggered so many viewer objections over the bikini bottoms — or lack thereof — that Network 10 went as far as to censor hover a black censorship bar over one woman’s bikini.

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“Back in my day, bikini bottoms legit covered your bottom. Simpler times,” one woman sighed online.

Emily Ratajkowski's swimwear line has caused controversy over just how skimpy some of the teeny weeny bikinis are. Picture: Instagram

These days, though, bottoms are everywhere.

Not to be outdone, Kim Kardashian, Emily Ratajkowski, Rihana, JLo and countless hordes of other Instagram influencers are taking things up a notch by championing the belfie (that’s a bum selfie).

There is the even more absurd ‘shelfie belfie’ craze — a belfie taken on a ledge or shelf (usually a pool or garden wall) to help maximise the spread of the derrière.

Kardashian (she of the “break the internet” bum) has kept up the trend by last month releasing her own line of body makeup. Because, obviously, your bum needs an even complexion when it’s getting so much airtime.

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Even tennis icon Serena Williams, 37, and her naked bum share this month’s cover of US style-bible Harper’s Bazaar.

But I’m ready to see the back of this ridiculous obsession.

As a mother of twins currently in nappies, I see bums frequently. So much so that whenever I venture onto social media and am faced with a stream of bums my immediate reflex is to reach for some wet wipes, give them a smear of Sudocrem and wrestle a nappy on them. I can’t help it.

Cardi B has talked at length about how much she loves her illegal bum injections. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty

Kim Kardashian’s bum “broke the internet”. Picture: Paper Magazine

I hail from the era of Kate Moss, when women wanted to be boyish and snake-hipped.

Big bottoms may also be incomprehensible to the generations of women who prayed at the altars of Atkins and aerobics to whittle down their frames to whippet thin.

Yet these days, no bum is too big.

Not since the Victorian era, when women shoved bustles up their skirts, have we been so infatuated with engorging women’s rears.

Even Pippa Middleton has been butt shamed.

The sister of Kate, who unleashed global conniptions with her royal bridesmaid backside, was recently criticised by a British paper for having a flat behind or, as it was so rudely described, a “mum bum”.

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How is it that, in the midst of an obesity epidemic, we are lusting over large rumps?

The dissenters will moan in the name of female empowerment that we should celebrate all sizes and let women do what they want with their bodies. But that is where the problem with this trend is rearing its ugly behind.

It has morphed into a hideous — and deadly — freak show.

The Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) of enlarging bottoms to bizarre proportions is the deadliest of any cosmetic procedure, with one person in every 3000 operations dying.

One in every 3000 women die in their attempt to attain the ‘perfect’ bum. Picture: Inamorata

While there are no known deaths in Australia, there have been many overseas, including Evita Sarmonikas, 29, of the Gold Coast, who died during a BBL procedure in Mexico in 2015.

The notorious procedure of injecting fat from the body into the buttocks is so dangerous, a specialist Aussie task force was set up to warn women of its risks.

“There’s no question there’s been an emphasis on the aesthetics of the butt,” Dr Tim said.

Papadopoulos, the taskforce chairman and past president of Australasian Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, has overseen an audit of about 330 Australian and New Zealand plastic surgeons.

While the results are set to be released later this year, but he says they were reassured to find Australia was “safe and conservative” in regards to BBLs.

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He urged women considering the procedure to seek out only Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons qualified plastic surgeons.

Alarmingly, some GPs are now doing BBLs, and those women with not enough body fat for transfer injections are bulking up at fat farms, Dr Papadopoulos revealed.

So what happens to all these rotund bums when the aesthetic obsession moves on to the next body part?

“Over time and, as the ageing process takes effect, the skin’s elasticity may not support the additional fat and the bottom may become lopsided, droopy and lumpy,” a British cosmetic surgeon has warned.

Here’s hoping they’ve been put out of public view by then.

Lucy Carne is the editor of RendezView.com.au