Maybe like me, you had been slightly stunned to open the newspaper Sunday morning and discover a full-page advert that includes a stark-naked Jennifer Lopez. In the event you had been on Sundown Boulevard, you may need seen the identical picture on a 60-foot billboard.
There she was, on her knees, staring on the digicam with a sultry expression. Within the photograph, her lips are parted in a come-hither expression, and her lengthy, tousled hair extensions fall under her tiny waist.
The curve of her well-known posterior calls to thoughts Dana Carvey’s beloved “Saturday Night time Dwell” impersonation of British singer George Michael describing his personal bottom: “It’s an ideal circle, can’t you see? ... It’s so good that English scientists use it to calibrate their devices!”
If I had to decide on, I might describe the aesthetic of the JLo advert as that of a tasteful Playboy centerfold. Nicely, why not? We stay in a world the place exhibitionism is rewarded, and it’s not as if her naughty bits are literally on show.
So what, in addition to her capability to defy age and gravity, is Lopez pitching?
That’s not precisely clear from the advert, however a cursory internet search reveals that she has added a brand new product to her eponymous magnificence line — a cream referred to as Agency + Flaunt, which is described on the label as a “focused booty balm.”
How I might like to imagine that focusing on my booty with JLo Physique balm would flip it right into a agency, rounded muscle with a glow that makes me appear as if I've been lit from the within.
However I stay firmly in the actual world and am fully conscious that nothing wanting painful, costly and dangerous surgical procedure can be wanted to present me something just like the curves for which Lopez has lengthy been well-known.
Lopez was on the vanguard of what I view because the booty positivity motion, exemplified to the purpose of cultural exhaustion in recent times by the Kardashian clan, whose hind components seem unnaturally, cartoonishly giant and appear to develop as their waistlines contract. In addition they elevate uncomfortable questions concerning the fetishization of the Black feminine physique and its appropriation by white ladies. However that’s a topic for an additional day.
A sort of beauty surgical procedure often called the “Brazilian butt raise” is booming — fats is taken from one a part of the physique and added to the bottom at a mean price of $5,000, however it could price as much as 3 times that, relying on the standard of aftercare. Not too long ago, the New York Occasions journal ran a photograph function on the method with the headline “Butt lifts are booming. Therapeutic isn't any joke.” It confirmed ladies post-surgery in uncomfortable-looking blood-stained girdles to mildew their new shapes, both standing or flat on their bellies, as a result of they aren't allowed to sit down at first whereas they heal. In 2021, the story mentioned, 61,387 “buttocks augmentations” had been carried out in the USA.
Practically 25 years in the past, a younger Jennifer Lopez posed for the photographer Firooz Zahedi in Vainness Truthful, sporting solely high-heeled slides and satin underwear with a lace-up again. In 1998, the photograph shocked, not as a result of she was half-naked, however as a result of her curvaceous bottom so defied the almost emaciated preferrred of the second, embodied by the wispy Kate Moss and Gwyneth Paltrow, and the atrocious modeling aesthetic often called “heroin stylish.” Lopez, then approaching 30, helped shatter that normal.
The truth that a 53-year-old lady now stands — or kneels, on this case — as a magnificence icon in a tradition that worships youth is refreshing and possibly even slightly empowering for these of us who consider ourselves as 30 till we glance within the mirror and bear in mind we're twice that.
That she can also be a brand new bride, reunited with long-lost love Ben Affleck, can also be a pleasant twist on the theme that one isn't too outdated to start out over.
“As ladies, persons are so prepared to put in writing us off, as soon as we’re previous 25, 35,” Lopez says in a video on her magnificence web site. “And I simply saved ready for that to occur, after which I spotted, no, I'm not gonna let that occur.... Magnificence doesn’t actually have an expiration date.”
(Relationships do, although. Throughout a part of that video, she is sitting subsequent to her then-fiance Alex Rodriguez. They broke up final yr; A-Rod, 47, is now relationship a 25-year-old aggressive physique builder and dietitian.)
Sadly, no quantity of physique cream, not even one which prices $65 for a 4.2-ounce jar, goes to do for any of us what wonderful genetics, a punishing exercise schedule and entry to top-notch beauty alteration have carried out for the brand new Mrs. Affleck.
Years in the past, I interviewed the director of the Meals and Drug Administration’s Division of Cosmetics Know-how for a narrative on the proliferation of lotions, ointments and serums claiming to reverse the growing old course of.
He advised me that if his spouse got here dwelling with an costly cream she claimed would erase her wrinkles, he would demand she return it. Nevertheless, he added, if she mentioned she purchased it as a result of it made her be ok with herself, then extra energy to her.
Bottling hope, in any case, is a tried-and-true approach to get wealthy. Or within the case of Jennifer Lopez, richer.
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