Does my butt look big in this? Good! M&S launches its £15 padded trousers tomorrow – JULIA LAWRENCE put them to the test… and found they made her 50-something bum look decades younger.

Along with a good proportion of honest women over a certain age, I’m always looking for a daring new way to go back in time.

Ion-Loaded, Peptide-Boosting, Miracle Correcting Serum with Vitamin K Goji Berry and Bee Venom? Oh yeah, put it on. I’ll try anything.

Apparently we still vain and solvent fifty-somethings spend thousands of dollars every year propping up the anti-ageing industry (worth almost £50bn globally), in search of something that will lift that up, soften that up and will disguise this and that. thus fooling the world into believing that we have completed considerably fewer revolutions around the sun than we actually have.

Until now, my natural pessimism, which always persuades me that things are going to go disastrously wrong, has kept me away from the surgeon’s scalpel or any other terrifying instrument in his toolbox, but I’m always up for a clever new trick. and painless, yes I think it could get me a few more years or a compliment or two.

And who would have thought… the answer I’ve been looking for all these years may not be in the creams I apply to the wrinkles around my eyes, nor in the chemicals I paint on the gray hair of my hair, but in the panties I wear. every morning.

Marks & Spencer will unveil its first ‘bum-enhancing pants’ tomorrow – a bit like a Wonder Bra for your backside, the £15 pair of shorts promises to help replenish what’s time and plummeting estrogen levels they took.

These pants aren’t just meant to give you a bigger butt, because let’s face it, certain millionaire reality TV stars aside, who wants one of those? — but more youthful, by enhancing and ‘boosting’ the buttocks, making them appear taller and rounder.

Young bottoms are different from old bottoms, you see. It all has to do with fluctuations in fat distribution and muscle mass. At puberty, girls begin to produce more estrogen, which encourages fat accumulation in the hips and buttocks.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that we are programmed to find this rounded, plump shape more pleasing, as it provides a visual indication of a woman’s youth and fertility, with sufficient fat reserves needed to endure pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Then, of course, between the ages of 40 and 50, menopause hits and everything falls apart. As we age, estrogen levels decrease, fat naturally atrophies, and the skin can sag, making the butt appear flattened and sagging. As the beautiful youthful fat disappears, the old and unpleasant cellulite that ruins the figure makes its presence more obvious.

And to top it all off, after age 35, women are said to lose an average of 5 percent of muscle mass each year, adding to this overall “withering party balloon” effect on our butts.

Until very recently, the perimenopausal pancake was something we all accepted, if we even realized it. Unlike breasts, buttocks have the advantage of being behind us, so we don’t get daily reminders of their gradual disappearance.

Then along came Kim Kardashian, with a butt that looked like a pair of bowling balls wrapped in a tea towel, and butt enhancement became the latest “big thing” in cosmetic surgery. In 2020, the Aesthetic Society recorded 40,320 buttock augmentation procedures, which included both fat grafts and buttock implants.

Nowadays, if it really bothers you enough (and you have plenty of cash), a woman can spend around £8,000 on hyaluronic acid injections into the buttocks or, more drastically, opt for a pair of silicone implants, both highly invasive procedures.

Which, I must admit, leaves me a little perplexed. There’s no official breakdown of the ages of these women who spent all that money and endured all that pain, but I’m guessing there aren’t many of my generation. The prominent, round, muscular and elevated butt is an aesthetic that attracts women between 20 and 30 years old. And yet, when I was her age, every girl I knew wanted a smaller butt; the absolute goal seemed to be to look like you had no butt at all.

As a typical pear-shaped English woman, who has had to work hard all my life to maintain my size 10 figure, I envied those slim, androgynous girls on holiday, whose shorts seemed to hang effortlessly off their hips. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that these women were probably coveting the butt that I had longed to disappear in my youth.

As with fashion, perceptions of body ideals tend to follow cyclical patterns, and it’s good to know that there is a completely safe and painless way for girls who want to follow this trend that is now in the underwear mecca .

Soozie Jenkinson, head of lingerie design at Marks & Spencer, explains: “We’ve had requests from both UK and international customers, looking for a product that does for the bum what we’ve been doing for the breasts for years.”

Bras, of course, have been around forever, in fact, since before Roman times. Worn for both comfort and aesthetic reasons, they have come in all forms until we crossed the Rubicon of shapewear in 1991 with the invention of the Wonderbra, made famous by the ‘Hello Boys’ advertising campaign, starring Czech model Eva Herzigova. .

By lifting and accentuating the shape of the bust with padding, Wonderbra is another anti-aging strategy, making breasts appear plumper and perkier (and therefore younger) without the need for enhancement surgery.

When I was asked to try on the pants, I was slightly offended at first. What’s wrong with my butt? I thought. It does what it’s designed to do and I really haven’t seen it in years.

But then I remembered a recent incident where I accidentally put my running shorts on backwards and was baffled to discover that they actually fit better.

When I was 50, it turned out that the extra material was proving much more useful in the front, supporting my belly, than in the back, where my butt had obviously left the party some time ago, taking the balloons with it.

At first glance, the M&S pants look like a pair of control pants (a fantastic invention, and I have many pairs), but they have a pair of removable pads added, which sit on top of the buttocks, like a pair of fillets. light chicken. ‘.

They are surprisingly comfortable and quite fitted. I imagine they would be very useful at an outdoor picnic, where you would have your own little custom-made cushion to protect you from the cold, hard ground, but they would possibly be too warm for an evening where tights could also be worn.

Once worn, the effect is… curious. In pants, the difference is instantaneous and, in my opinion, too much. Instead of being youthful and perky, my butt looked like it had gained 10 pounds, but without the full ‘necks and cuffs’ package of a larger bust and a plumper, less wrinkled face.

That is the problem with these intervention measures: I compare them to small renovations in the house. Once you paint the baseboard, the walls look scruffy: then the carpet, then the curtains, then the furniture, until you find yourself in a situation where you’ve trashed your entire house and can’t live in it anymore. further.

However, with a fitted dress, the silhouette it gave me was much more flattering. Again, it would be better with a padded push-up bra, which could give you hourglass curves without making you look like you have a heavy butt. Being effective control pants, they also do a good job of holding in the stomach and pinching the waist.

Would anyone else notice? I wondered. My husband, not known for his powers of observation, was invited into the marital fly trap when I asked him if he noticed anything different about me. ‘New jeans?’ He ventured nervously before I told him that he actually had a new butt. ‘But what’s wrong with your old ass?’ he asked…he is well trained.

It’s a novel idea, and I imagine some women who have felt self-conscious about their lack of curves will welcome this new addition to their wardrobe. There’s something about the traditional, feminine hourglass shape that adds a touch of elegance to a simple, fitted dress. But for now, I think I’ll stick to the backside that nature and time gave me.

Unless, of course, I’m invited to a picnic this summer.