What Cardi B’s BBL Comments Reveal About Beauty Trends

Earlier this year, Cardi announced plans to travel to Colombia after her Little Miss Drama tour ends to have her butt implants removed. The revelation came after Kehlani told her backstage, “You have so much ass!” following their surprise performance of their collaboration “Safe” at the rapper’s sold-out Los Angeles show on Monday, Feb. 16.

“After this tour, I’m taking some out,” she told Kehlani playfully. “After this tour, I don’t hear nobody for three months. I’m going to Colombia, nobody hit me up, nothing. I’m taking this ass out!”

Since then, Cardi has apparently had a change of heart because on a recent appearance with TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones, where she talked about the launch of her new hair care brand Grow Good, Cardi also shared about why she’s taken a step back from her initial plans of reversing her butt job. 

“I was just gonna take a little bit of butt out, but I don’’t have time for that,” she said. 

This has had me thinking a lot about beauty standards lately and how they seem to shift every five to ten years—always at the detriment of women of color. While the pressure to be thin has existed in this country for decades, particularly in the ’90s, we had a good solid seven to eight years where inclusivity and body acceptance were finally being taken seriously. Even fashion brands and designers were being held accountable for promoting a narrow view of feminine bodies

But with the trending rise of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs—which have become both a craze and, strangely, the norm—being thin seems to be back in style. It’s playing out onscreen, too: from Love Thy Nader, where Brooks Nader is confronted by her sisters on her GLP-1 use, to The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where Layla Taylor open up her unhealthy relationship with the drug. Then there’s “SkinnyTok,” where women casually document what they eat in a day, how they shrink portions or push through cravings—framed not as warning signs but as routine. As if we’ve suddenly forgotten that thinness isn’t synonymous with being healthy.

But this isn’t just about thinness coming back—it’s about who gets to move in and out of these trends without consequence.

Across TikTok and influencer culture, the shift is already happening in real time: BBLs are being reversed, bodies are being reshaped again, and the same women who were once told to “enhance” are now being told to scale back.  It’s further proof that even when curvier bodies and BBLs were considered acceptable, they weren’t seen as acceptable on Black and brown women—they were only embraced when white women adopted them.

Like it or not, what is seen as “beautiful” has historically been dictated by proximity to whiteness, not origin.Even when Black and Latina celebrities were embracing their naturally curvier shapes and fuller figures, it wasn’t until white women adopted those features that they were recognized as mainstream.

And this pattern isn’t new—it’s cyclical. For decades, curves, fuller figures, and features associated with women of color were considered less beautiful and were often either rejected or hypersexualized. The “slim-thick” or curvy body only started receiving praise once the Kardashians rose to prominence—around the same time BBLs became more common.

But with this recent pivot back to thinness—framed as “disciplined,” “clean,” “healthy,” “timeless”—the whiplash is immediate. What was once aspirational is now positioned as excessive. Our natural bodies tend to align more closely with what has suddenly gone out of style.

It sends a clear message: when curves are trending, you may be considered desirable, but you’re also hypersexualized and fetishized. And when thinness returns, it tells curvier women it’s time to shrink.

When thinness is back in style, it gets framed as “taking care of yourself,” while being fuller-figured is cast as “letting yourself go.” And when thinness is in, Black and Latina women are often criticized as lacking restraint or being overly indulgent.

When BBLs were trending, sure, it allowed Black and Latina women a bit of praise for having naturally curvier figures. It also did away with some of the stigma around women of color getting plastic surgery procedures like liposuction and butt enhancement treatments. But at its core, it was really about monetizing our features and turning them into an aspirational aesthetic for the moment.

What’s particularly harmful isn’t just the trend itself— it’s the pattern: these aesthetics are built from marginalized women’s bodies without protecting or valuing them. And when the trend fades, Black and Latina women are often left carrying the stigma again—without ever having fully benefited from the acceptance.

In the end, this shift toward thinness and away from curves and BBLs is less about body types and more about a system that profits off Black and Latina bodies, shifts standards without accountability, and leaves women of color to bear the psychological cost.

So when Cardi B jokes about “taking this ass out,” it doesn’t land in a vacuum. It lands in a culture that’s constantly telling women like her when their bodies are in— and when they’re not.

Because the problem was never the trend. It’s that we were never meant to fit into it in the first place.