After some furious jiggling around, I got myself sorted out. It was tight – very tight
Last month the queen of big bottoms and snatched waistlines, Kim Kardashian herself, dropped the latest item in her Skims shapewear collection: the Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap. In case you missed this critical moment in fashion history, allow me to unpack it for you: it’s a wrap that goes around your head to “sculpt” it. “Sculpt” it? Yes, sculpt it. The wrap promises “soft jaw support” and signature sculpting fabric” and will cost you £52. And if you think that sounds unhinged, so do I.
The launch of this garment has inspired a number of journalists to try it out and report their results. Not to be outdone, and riding high on the success of my Skims nipple bra review a few months ago, I decided I would go one better and attempt to stuff my size 14 frame into as much of the shapewear line as humanly (and financially) possible to see if this made me more attractive. Would I emerge looking like a Grecian goddess, sculpted from the finest marble – or, in this case, the finest “collagen-infused fibres” – or would the Skims shapewear finally meet its match?
Spoiler alert, dear reader. My bottom won.
The first obstacle to overcome was that the Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap had actually sold out. Yes, despite my incredulity, it seems there are a lot of heads out there in need of a sculpting. Perhaps it was sold out because of journalists rushing to write about how bonkers the whole idea truly is. I know that’s why I wanted to buy it.
The wrap claims to use “collagen-infused fibres”. I’m not sure what that means, because according to the website it’s made from polyamide and elastane. Thankfully, I managed to find another facial compression garment made from polyamide and elastane on Amazon for a fiver. After rubbing it all over with a collagen tablet that I found at the back of my kitchen cupboards, I felt I had a decent approximation of the real thing.
I also had my Skims nipple push-up bra, a brassiere with the thickness of an insulation cavity slab and bullet-like nipple detail, swinging off the front. A few months ago, this bra was being sold with pierced nipples, but was only available for a limited time. I was very sorry to have missed that opportunity, but decided I could always ram a couple of old Christmas earrings through mine if the mood really took me.
But if I really wanted to achieve the coveted Kardashian shape, I would need a bigger bottom and a smaller waist, and thankfully, both were just a click away. For the purpose of this article, I invested in a Skims “waist trainer” and their “butt enhancing padded shorts”. I briefly considered trying their “body posture training vest’” but wasn’t sure if it was compatible with the fake nipples so I left it.
Laying my Skims haul out on the bed, I suddenly had a flashback to The Silence of the Lambs and Buffalo Bill stitching himself a woman suit made from real women. The nipple bra is so padded it can stand up on its own and the butt shorts come with ass-shaped padding in the back, so look very much like a severed bottom. Hello, Clarice.
Once again, my good friend Verity volunteered herself to help me with this mission, and a mission it was. I don’t know if you have ever tried to squeeze your bottom into another, smaller bottom, but it was a humbling experience. I felt like a baby marsupial being lowered into its mother’s pouch. Plus, the right arse cheek had folded in on itself within the lining and this meant that my rear end was off kilter from the get-go. After some furious jiggling around, I got myself sorted out. It was tight – very tight.
I required Verity’s help to get me into the waist trainer, as this was like trying to push jelly through a mangle. I messed up the hook and eye fasteners several times before I finally gave up and called for help. I don’t want to describe what I put that woman through, but I feel our friendship now has elements of the lesbian about it.
After a great deal of effort, I finally got it all on and stood back to take my new shape in. I looked like a sausage with tits. It was like I was wearing a fat-suit, only it wasn’t fat; this was a Kardashian suit. I was wearing Kim Kardashian’s body, if she had scaled up a few sizes. The tits were huge and unnaturally perky, my waist was sucked in to the point I feared displacing an organ, and I had a bottom you could park a bicycle in.
I had achieved “the look”, but did I feel sexy? Did I hell. Partly because I couldn’t stop laughing, but mostly because my movement was so restricted, I looked like I was doing the robot dance whenever I tried to move. None of which was helped by a friend who was hyperventilating with fits of the giggles at the very sight of me.
I had also found a Skims dress on Vinted, so we maneuvered my Kardashianised figure into it in order to see “the look’” in clothing. As uncomfortable as all that clobber was, I have to say, it did hold everything in and push what was left over up. I thought I would require rivets to hold the seams together, but it all managed to stay put for the duration. But I just couldn’t move naturally.
We had planned to go for lunch, but I found it so difficult to move that I only made it to the kitchen to have a cup of tea. I couldn’t even sit down to drink it properly. I only managed to keep it all on for about half an hour. Before anyone says I must have got the wrong size, I did not. I was measured before purchasing anything.
The sheer relief I felt in taking it off cannot be adequately conveyed in words. Imagine the overwhelming sense of freedom you experience when you take a bra off at the end of the day and multiply that by about a billion. I know that there are people who do wear waist trainers, control pants and push-up bras every day, but I really don’t think this is for me. I am happy to let the flubber fly free.
Getting out of it was considerably easier than getting into it, which was a relief. The fabric was pulled so tight I had feared creating some kind of a fallout zone once the tension was released. But it seems the shapewear was just as keen for it to be taken off as I was. Verity wouldn’t have been able to help me even if I had needed her to by this point. She was convulsing at the undignified sight of me hobbling back upstairs.
Shapewear isn’t anything new. We have been lacing ourselves into corsets, filling out bustles, and forcing our boobs skywards for hundreds of years. But there is something horribly creepy about being strapped into someone else’s undercrackers in order to look like them. The level of vanity required to market what amounts to a bodysuit so other people can look like you seems truly deranged to me.
I also feel quite angry at the level of bullshit at work here. If there is a research paper that proves you can “train” a waist or sculpt a double chin by tightly wrapping it up, I’ve yet to see it. I have my suspicions about the effectiveness of “collagen infused fibres” as well.
I don’t see the point in wearing any of this, as those nearest to you know what your bottom looks like, and anyone that you might entice into taking a closer look is going to be left mildly traumatised when your tits and ass fall to the floor.
I will say this for the Skims line though: it’s funny. I thought the nipple bra alone was a good giggle, but having a fake bottom and a face bra took it to new levels of insanity. I would go as far as to say it was belly-achingly funny, but that may have just been the rivets on the waist trainer.
