In her acceptance speech on the Screen Actors Guild Awards earlier this yr, Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge broke the fourth wall of celebrity artifice by referencing the six pack her make-up artist had drawn on earlier that night. The revelation was evidence enough that as a culture, we’re thoroughly obsessive about abs. That’s not necessarily a recent thing. While the media has change into more open-minded to diverse representations of the human body in recent times, slim stays the norm on red carpets and magazine covers. What’s more, celebrities like Gigi Hadid, Teyana Taylor, and Emily Ratajkowski have raised the bar from merely skinny to extreme-looking, highly defined stomachs. 

Pronounced abdominal muscles, sometimes collectively known as a six pack, have been fashionable for hundreds of years. Walk the halls of any hallowed museum, and also you’ll find statues of men, just like the famous David, chiselled beyond imagination. Part athletes part deities, the honed Ancient Greek figure would rival any Brad Pitt physique of today. In comparison with Mark Wahlberg’s 1992 Calvin Klein ad, and the sculpted frames of Idris Elba, Zac Efron, Usher, Hugh Jackman and the complete cast of Magic Mike, little has modified on the subject of the perfect male body. Although, on the flip side, Leonardo DiCaprio’s open defiance of those ideals in his downtime and the rise of the ‘dad bod’ act as a resistance. 

What has modified, though, is the way in which society values visible musculature on women’s bodies. The hourglass-figured, soft-bellied pin-ups of Marilyn Monroe’s ilk made way for Cher’s washboard abs, imprinted within the collective memory when the singer-actress flaunted them at the 1973 Oscars. In the next many years, stars like Janet Jackson, Halle Berry, and Jennifer Lopez took the baton and assumed the position of best six packs in Hollywood.

The rise of athleisure and core-strengthening workouts have brought women’s abs into the highlight beyond the beach. As fitness and wellness culture grow increasingly intertwined, the pursuit of a washboard waist feels more relevant than ever. There are several ways to attain the right sculpted six pack. Gruelling day by day exercise coupled with a strict food plan and a little bit of patience might get you to washboard status in weeks or months. But you’ll have to keep on with the routine so long as you would like to maintain the effect. Plastic surgery techniques like abdominal etching and the aptly-named Adonis procedure can get you there in less time when you’re willing to shell out the hefty price tag. 

For the less committed (with less disposable income), temporary contouring with make-up and/or fake tan could be a relatively quick method to tone up for a photoshoot or special event.  “The midriff area has change into the most well liked a part of the body to have peek out of your clothes,” says Kristyn Pradas, a Los Angeles-based airbrush tanning artist who says ab contouring is the primary request she gets from clients. “Everyone loves an excellent body contour. It might probably boost your confidence when wearing an outfit and even just within the privacy of your individual home.” 

“The painted-on abs trend is more about enhancing the muscle definition you have already got relatively than making a six pack from scratch. On this sense, it’s not necessarily the product of unhealthy societal ideals, but relatively an adjunct to the restrictive diets and gruelling training we already put ourselves through in pursuit of the ‘ideal’ body”

Even though it has never fully caught on in the patron market, body make-up is standard practice amongst skilled make-up artists. “Any good make-up artist knows that make-up doesn’t stop on the face,” says Jonny Polizzi, a Manhattan-based make-up artist and owner of The Center of Makeup Artistry and Design. But Polizzi also warns that while this make-up may look great on film, it doesn’t translate well within the flesh, where lighting is unpredictable and unforgiving. 

The essential concept of contouring is painting on shadows to strategically trick the attention into perceiving depth. “Just follow the lines of the muscles and whatever you make darker, that’s going to push it back. Whatever you make lighter goes to look more forward within the image,” says Australian-born, Recent York-based make-up artist Tobi Henney. To get the effect, she recommends using a cream product (like Tom Ford Shade and Illuminate) and setting it with a powder. The same effect will be created using fake tan, says Pradas, who has her clients flex certain muscles to assist her accentuate accordingly. 

Given the rise of heavily contoured faces, it’s a natural progression for the body to receive the identical treatment. Body contouring first got here into the mainstream in 2016, when Australian vlogger Chloe Morello shared a tongue-in-cheek tutorial poking fun at what was then the peak of contour mania. The satirical how-to video introduced those not within the know to the seemingly outrageous manifestation of a trend-gone-too-far. If truth be told, using make-up to shade indents and enhance the look of peaks and valleys below the face is fairly common. From the cleavage and clavicles of stars like Mandy Moore and Kristen Bell, to full body foundation on Beyoncé. 

A part of the appeal of Netflix’s docuseries Cheer is the way it lays bare the drastic physical and aesthetic demands within the Navarro College cheer team’s quest for much more championship glory unflinchingly. The constant pursuit for bodily perfection can result in an environment of inadequacy, something Chelsey, a former highschool cheerleader who first used make-up to contour her abdomen as a freshman, knows only too well. “My coach said that we wanted to have our abs pop while we were on stage and that he wanted the judges to have the option to see our abs in our uniform. Wow, this sounds so fucked saying it out loud.” Already insecure about her abs before her coach introduced contouring (a ritual which stays popular amongst cheerleaders today), her squadmates cleverly applied six packs on one another. “Doing that made me super self-conscious in my overall life, like why am I drawing on my abs? I should appear to be this on a regular basis after which I wouldn’t must do that.”

Given what appears to be a cooldown of the facial contouring craze, how popular is body contouring now? It’s alive and well within the fitness arena. “Every guy I’ve ever worked with is like, ‘Hey, are you able to make my abs look more defined?’” says Polizzi. Muscle-emphasising contour make-up also plays a giant role in bodybuilding competitions and Broadway productions, where exaggerated visuals help play to crowds within the nosebleed seats. Polizzi, who has worked on Broadway shows previously, says, “In the event that they don’t have shirts on then we’re 150 per cent contouring them to the tenth degree.” 

The best way Polizzi sees it, contouring has change into a confidence booster, assuming the role of an on-set security blanket. For buff male models, that’s in the shape of a bit extra shading to boost the muscles they have already got. “Sometimes I’ll take only a brush with no make-up on it and pretend in order that the client feels higher.” He finds this especially useful on shoots where having a model look super chiselled and hyper muscular would feel incongruous. 

Ultimately contouring is an optical illusion best suited to the digital world. On Instagram, film, or television, with simply enough distance and otherworldliness to look real. The effect creates a type of Cinderella-like perfection – abs for a day, but you switch back right into a pumpkin when your six pack washes down the drain at the tip of the night. However the revelation of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s painted-on abs could be a fluke relatively than a peephole into the vault of top-secret celebrity intel. If her candour appeared like the primary clue to a mysterious scavenger hunt that ends with J.Lo, Marky Mark, and The Rock washing off their body contour to disclose normal-looking individuals with average bodies and natural folds, then perhaps it was a false alarm. 

Are six packs just the latest blip in a protracted line of impossible and oppressive body ideals? Yes and no. The painted-on abs trend is more about enhancing the muscle definition you have already got relatively than making a six pack from scratch. On this sense, it’s not necessarily the product of unhealthy societal ideals, but relatively an adjunct to the restrictive diets and gruelling training we already put ourselves through in pursuit of the “ideal” body. On the one hand, the proliferation of ab make-up propels perfection while obscuring and enhancing reality. On the flip side, popular culture hasn’t all the time rewarded women for being strong, in any sense of the word. Like most cosmetic trends, six pack contouring could also be a double-edged sword.