London - “Hot dog legs” and “thigh gaps” may have been the tedious running theme on social media for summer 2015, but thigh brows – a “set of folds that frames the top of your thigh and separates leg from butt” according to Elle – is something new altogether.
The thigh brow is described as the little crease that curvier women get between their upper thigh and torso when they bend their leg. In order to get a thigh brow, you need to be curvaceous.
While the Kardashian clan usually has the monopoly on every new Instagram trend, Rihanna, Beyonce and Nicki Minaj are also reportedly getting involved.
But although the hashtag (which also has its own dedicated Instagram account) was immediately hailed by some as a body-positive notion, others have suggested that it’s just another way of policing women’s bodies.
Courtney Marshall, a women’s studies professor at the University of New Hampshire, told the Daily Dot that she failed to see how it could be called a body-positive trend when it required a high-cut bathing suit.
“It also seems to require a flat belly, so that line about it being achievable for anyone seems fishy.”
However, Laura Jane Turner, of the UK’s Look magazine, sees it as a body positive trend.
“The explosion of the trend is thanks, in part, to those gloriously curvy celebrities we all know and love, and partly a result of the return of the high-rise swimsuit. Well, you’ve got to love a little old school glamour, right?” she wrote. “It’s also another wave in the amazing body-positive movement that’s sweeping the internet right now. Because, it’s pretty natural to sport a thigh brow. The best part? Most women have them without even trying.”
Social media tends to throw out a new part of the body for women to hate every few months. We have seen #sideboob, #underboob and even #sidebum this year alone.
At the beginning of this year it was the mons pubis, which came into the spotlight thanks to Sports Illustrated cover model Hannah Davis.
This resulted in a think piece asking if the mons pubis – the part of the body just above the labia – was the “new thigh gap”, where it was pointed out that there is a surgical procedure aimed at “correcting” that area for “any woman unhappy with its size, shape or excess skin”.
The Independent (additional reporting by Buhle Mbonambi, Sunday Tribune)