Do the viral Amazon booty leggings live up to the TikTok hype?

With the latest #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt trend, your ass is on the line. Or rather, it’s accentuated by a scrunch pattern designed to create such a vortex around your booty cheeks that your significant other is sucked into a black hole of uncontrollable lust.

If you haven’t caught the cheap beauty buy that launched a thousand peach emoji on your For You Page yet, countless videos demonstrating the ass lifting power of Seasum’s now-viral leggings racked up millions of views over the past month. TikToker Lauren Wolfe is credited with starting the viral trend back in November, after discovering the leggings officially titled “High Waist Yoga Pants Tummy Control Slimming Booty Leggings Workout Running Butt Lift Tights” (to be exact). They’ve since earned the moniker of “magic leggings” from another TikTok user, but are more commonly referred to as simply the “Amazon booty leggings” or “TikTok butt lift leggings.”

When I happened upon one such video earlier in December, I mindlessly followed what everyone else did, the promise of a prominent derriere seeming to cast a spell on me that I was powerless to resist. 

Already, the delivery period for the leggings was way longer than what’s typical for Amazon. If even the monolith of ungodly fast delivery is struggling to keep up, then demand must be skyrocketing (compounded perhaps by the ramp up of general online holiday shopping and the coronavirus).

While I waited, I kept seeing more and more booty legging videos that further hyped me up. An offshoot trend evolved, in which the wearer covertly puts them on to then capture how their significant other reacts on camera. The results speak for themselves, with responses so universal that they cross the barriers of straight and gay TikTok, inspiring dumbfounded ass spankings from both boyfriends and girlfriends alike.

I wondered if any piece of athleisure could live up to such high expectations of instantly causing a significant other to devolve into a cartoon wolf howling “awooga.” I also wondered what I wouldn’t try in my lifelong quest to meet the big booty standards I’d grown up idolizing yet always felt miserably short of achieving. (My most embarrassing of said purchases has to be the Brazilian Bum Bum Cream. Thankfully, I avoided the butt pad trend of 2015-2016.)

For the past decade, the Instagram “baddie” aesthetic gave rise to more thicc body beauty ideals, though disproportionately slim waists are often still a pre-requisite to fitting these new standards. But you all merely adapted to the Beyoncé and Kardashian-fueled idolization of big asses. I was born in it.

As a Brazilian-born white Latina who predominantly inherited caucasian genes from my Swiss father, I grew up believing myself on the “flatty” end of the ass spectrum. With only the astronomical fatties of my sisters and cousins for comparison, my booty insecurity became one of the many sources of my identity crisis struggles. Since I didn’t look enough like the “exotic” Brazilian stereotypes popularized by Victoria Secret models, some folks would actually laugh and say “no you’re not” when I’d tell them the fact that I was Brazilian. 

To my shock, though, my flatty (by Brazilian standards) was not actually a cause for their incredulity. Apparently in America, I was considered to possess something closer to a fatty — at least according to the testimonials of multiple sex partners. Picking up roller skating during the pandemic only brought me closer to achieving the hyper-muscular thighs and asses that define beauty standards in Brazil.

So these cheap leggings (which many of the over 20,000 Amazon reviewers warn are not durable enough to be “squat proof”) had to withstand a lot of pressure. With a section in the official description explicitly describing them as giving a “Brazilian Booty Enhance,” they had to not only resolve the deep-rooted insecurities of a multicultural identity but also a focal point of my body dysmorphia.

No leggings can solve all the underlying social issues that lead women to be so inescapably unsatisfied with our bodies.

And, listen, the leggings work as advertised — there’s no dispute there. But at the risk of stating the obvious, no leggings can solve all the underlying social issues that lead women to be so inescapably unsatisfied with our bodies’ for not conforming to every impossible beauty standard the powers-at-be decide is en vogue. 

Sure, the sky blue Seasum leggings do indeed give my cheeks the illusion of a boost, while also eradicating the cellulite that’s only natural for bodies with a good amount of cake. They even led my partner to act similarly out of character, his usually unwaveringly supportive, sex-positive, never controlling demeanor challenged by an impulse to gently suggest I not wear them to skate in public without him. 

That’s the other thing the Seasum leggings can’t fix, which one of the viral TikTok videos mentions in passing in regards to transparency issues: They do their job so well that, for some, it can feel inappropriate or even unsafe to actually wear out. 

Wearing them drew enough unwanted attention to make me clutch my pepper spray tighter as I walked home from the park alone after dark. After initially waving my boyfriend’s concerns away with an eye roll, I haven’t worn them in public since. Logically, I know it’s my right to wear whatever I want and that harassment and assault happen no matter what you wear. But a lifetime of social programming and past trauma doesn’t allow me to exercise that right as freely as I’d like to. 

We all deserve to enjoy the retail-therapy salves that both help us survive but also perpetuate the inescapable pressures of “perfect” body standards. But we need to purchase them fully cognizant of the insidiousness beneath it all. Not to get too Feminism 101 here, but capitalism is built on the prediction of making consumers believe this or that purchase will fix this or that insecurity invented by the advertising itself.

Even while admiring how my own ass looked in the leggings, I couldn’t stave off thoughts of how it didn’t look as good as some of the TikTokers, or gave me a slight muffin top it didn’t give them. When beauty is an impossible goal always kept just out of reach (at best), then we will always be paying for the privilege of perpetual dissatisfaction.

A lot of the viral TikTok videos about the leggings herald them as a solution for all average to no-booty bodies. But as one video reviewing a close dupe of Seasum’s leggings pointed out, I hadn’t seen a single one showing how it fit a plus-sized body before. She wasn’t very impressed (though many other plus-sized reviews on Amazon said they loved them). Inevitably, the leggings won’t suit all the varieties of body types that exist. Celebrating them too much as a one-size-fits-all “fix” can make the leggings’ failure to accommodate the full scope of body types feel like a personal failure instead. That disappointment is also a lot less likely to be posted or go viral online, too.

For me, TikTok’s viral butt leggings mostly delivered on the booty that was promised. But the cost of their hype could be far steeper than the budget-friendly price point suggests.