Let’s talk.
Ms. Banks, a dancer at the King of Diamonds strip club, showing off her massive, illegally injected ass in a backstage dressing room. All photos by Ben Rosenzweig for Vice.com
No, let’s talk for real. Get a shot of that left cheek in the mirror, though.
Vice.com has created a documentary featuring the all-too-famous K.O.D. – the King of Diamonds – showcasing the realities of butt injections over time. And the trailer is kind of shocking:
The article makes me have infinite sadz. I’m not quoting the entire thing, but a few key parts:
It’s important to point out that there are legal butt-enhancing procedures. The FDA deems both implants and fat transfer—where fat is liposuctioned from areas like the patient’s stomach and transferred to his or her fanny—to be safe when conducted by a board-certified plastic surgeon. However, many women choose the black-market procedure to save money. Legal implants and fat transfers can cost up to $10,000 more than their illicit counterparts. For Oscarina, on the other hand, it was more about the shorter recovery time for injections than their lower cost. Fat transfer and butt implants require weeks of recuperation, and the final results don’t settle in for months. Injections result in a new rear end almost instantaneously, as if you’d put your backside in a butt microwave.
Ass shots will have your ass looking like this soon enough. pic.twitter.com/4C5irRt87t
— Oh Jae (@MagicCity305) January 8, 2014
The horror that befell Oscarina Busse’s backside began in July 2009. The 35-year-old Floridian felt a dull but persistent itch deep in the meat of her buttocks, one that was impossible to scratch.
It wasn’t long before Oscarina noticed that her butt was changing colors—first turning purple, like a throbbing finger that had been wrapped too tightly with string, and then a cadaverous gray. From there, things got much worse. Her flesh started to crust and painfully peel off until, a few months later, the whole mess collapsed like a badly baked cake. The cheeks of her ass drooped down, loaded with a stew of poisonous goop that collected around her lower buttocks. What had once stood high and felt supple to the touch had become hot and hard and stinging. Oscarina’s derrière had transformed so much that it no longer looked like it was part of a human’s body; her five-year-old daughter mistook her fluid-filled cheeks for a poopy diaper, calling it a “full Pamper.”
[…]
The crude inflation procedure consists of shooting a liquid substance such as silicone or mineral oil directly into a client’s butt cheeks and hips through a syringe. There is no substance that is safe to inject into your body to create more volume, not even medical-grade silicone, but these black-market “butt doctors” have, according to victims, allegedly used harsh substances like concrete and the industrial silicone sold at hardware stores in their procedures. After the injections, the exterior flesh wounds are sometimes closed with Super Glue to prevent the toxic slop from leaking out.
In October, I met Oscarina at the beauty salon she owns in Coral Gables, Florida, to better understand why someone would inject their butt with toxic chemicals. She wore a form-fitting pantssuit, high heels that cackled against the salon’s linoleum floor, and a citrusy perfume that permeated the room as she paced back and forth from the shampoo bowls to her styling chair. Surprisingly, her butt seemed high and round. It looked pretty good, especially considering that only a few years ago her haunches had mutated into a distorted heap of poisoned flesh and immense pain.
Oscarina is lucky. She’s one of the few women who, after realizing something was very wrong with her new ass, managed to find a doctor who was willing to surgically remove the substances from her body and rebuild her butt, possibly saving her life in the process. She told me that the whole ordeal is something she feels gravely foolish about now, considering she was blessed with a shapely Dominican figure. But in south Florida, where gargantuan asses plop down every boardwalk and beach each minute of the day, just having a “nice butt” isn’t good enough for many. “No one [here] is ever happy with their body,” the beautician said to me sheepishly. “It wasn’t because I didn’t have it. I just wanted it to be better.”
Due to the challenge of reversing such a botched and unsanctioned operation and the resulting potential for legal liability, many doctors will not help a patient like Oscarina. Injected silicone can be corrosive and can easily migrate throughout the body. When it breaks down, which can happen in a matter of hours or over the course of several years, it becomes almost impossible to completely identify or locate. According to a comprehensive history of silicone injections in the US edited by Harvard Law professor Peter Barton Hutt, 555cc of silicone can break apart into 30 billion small globules once inside the body, and each of those 30 billion pieces has the potential to cause an infectious reaction. In other words, getting this stuff in your butt is easy—but to take it out involves getting carved up like a doner kebab.
“After going to consultations with doctors, their reactions made me think I was going to die,” Oscarina said. “I had this painful problem and nobody would touch me.”
In my mind, there is nothing wrong with wanting to change your body.It is, however, essential that your desires be rooted in reality; that you are making logical, healthy and sound decisions in the process; that your decisions are being made to appease you and not society; and that you are not endangering your well being along the way. Because butt implants fall squarely out of these parameters for me, there’s now way I’m gonna stop showing y’all the horrors of this stuff.
Y’all. Y’ALL. Help me understand. Talk to me.
9 comments
I know that due to the popularity of buttock surgeries and injections, there are legitimate reasons for all of the stories that I see about butts, but I still find some of them unsettling. It’s so rare to see brown women with voluptuous behinds in the media. But I dislike how the focus is on the …. on how deformed, weird and grotesque (because these stories always have to include backside that has been overinflated) a brown bottom can be.
ANYWAY BACK TO THIS PARTICULAR POST: I empathize a lot more with the people who choose this surgery now, versus when I first heard about a butt injection horror story. A desire to be considered beautiful/desirable, a belief that beauty matters nearly above all else, and desperation all combine to allow people to make this choice. This isn’t a matter that completely relies upon a simple matter of being better informed. This is a matter of self esteem/emotional well being. And I don’t know of any mass campaign to correct that.
“This isn’t a matter that completely relies upon a simple matter of being better informed.”
To be clear, I don’t think it’s ever a matter of “being better informed” — I think that would undermine an individual’s agency, their ability to make their own choices. And no information is powerful enough to override all of the other things that contribute to a person’s choice.
If a woman is in an environment where having a larger ass directly affects her ability to make good or better money, and I tell her that having industrial-grade silicone injected into her booty could kill her down the line… she still has to choose. My information isn’t powerful enough for all that.
That being said, that doesn’t mean that women have all the information or even accurate information when they make these decisions. And encouraging people – because this thing is apparently on the rise among men, as well – to make wiser decisions that aren’t spur of the moment-focused, to consider all of her options, and to even consider that perhaps the environment she’s in isn’t encouraging her to make the wisest decisions, and it’s time to formulate an exit strategy.
I think that information will never be the full component, but I think it’s a component that makes a huge difference.
“No one [here] is ever happy with their body,” the beautician said to me sheepishly. “It wasn’t because I didn’t have it. I just wanted it to be better.”
This is the saddest thing I have ever read. I like my body, but part of the reason I work out is because I enjoy the process of improving my body’s health and seeing results from the work I put in. It’s so fulfilling to achieve a goal. I like saying “I did that!” I wish some of these women felt the same. Squats won’t achieve a large ass, but it will achieve a pert, strong one.
+1
Erika. I am with you on this. That is something I just never have considered. Ever. There are many this I do wish to change but to go such dangerous lengths to do it. My goodness. I believe this kind of desperation is rooted in the soul. For these women their lives depended on getting that booty job. Who puts that much stock into their body? Not to say not to want change or not to care for yourself, but we could get in a car crash today leaving you without use of all your limbs. Then that booty job is useless. This is so sad. What are we telling ourselves that we would do such damage to our bodies?
I don’t know why some women think this is the answer. Your injecting a foreign agent that could kill you in your body all for beauty?!! Seriously I have a big but and it just like a big chest it can wear on your back too and has cause me some pain, the fact Im trying to lose weigh won’t change it for me. My butt has always been my largest asset and if I could afford surgery to make it smaller I would consider, but messing with something that I was born with is like trying to get rid of my birthmark…it ain’t happening.
I’m horrified. I joke about my flat Irish ass alla time, but no effing way would I consider something like that. And that was before I saw that ^ photo. *shudder*
And, FTR, squats have absolutely made a difference for me. Good advice!
I went to the the strip club over the weekend, most of the girls looked like they used these butt injections. The majority of the strippers were black women. This got under my skin,
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