We have #ManCrushMonday, #TransformationTuesday, #WomenCrushWednesday, #ThrowbackThursday, #FlashbackFriday, and now we have #CelluliteSaturday.
THANK GOD.
Kenzie Brenna, a 26-year-old body activist and vlogger from Canada, started the hashtag last month in an attempt to normalise a fairly universal feature of women’s bodies.
“My cellulite is here to stay,” Brenna writes in one of her body positive Instagram posts.
“If you try to sell me your cellulite treatment, I don’t want it. Cellulite is normal. And the beauty industry capitalises on saying we need it removed.”
Brenna’s Instagram account openly documents her recovery from body dysmorphia, a disorder characterised by persistent thoughts about perceived flaws. When she was deep in the grips of the illness, she spent hours and hours trying to get rid of her cellulite, using every supposed remedy she could find.
“It’s just really tedious to think about it all of the time, and comes to point where you’re just like, ‘What am I doing?'” the body activist told The Huffington Post. “I would try on leggings at different athletic stores and go in the mirror and move in all these different ways to see if my cellulite was showing in the leggings.”
Now, Brenna is on a mission to accept her body as it is, and she wants to encourage other girls and women to do the same.
Indeed, Brenna is well-informed when it comes to tackling the purely “cosmetic issue” of cellulite, which is often marketed to women as a medical condition. We know that women of all body types can have cellulite, with one study estimating that 90 per cent of women have it. While weight gain can make cellulite more prominent, more often than not, it’s genetic.
It is perhaps indicative of women’s collective frustration that Brenna’s hashtag has already gained significant traction. Social media users have proudly posted their own #CelluliteSaturdays photos, adding their personal stories to the conversation.
One Instagram user who is recovering from an eating disorder posted a photo of her legs, writing, “If you’d told me a year ago I’d be posting pictures of my cellulite for the world to see I’d have laughed in your face.”
“But look at me now! Cellulite is NORMAL. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Perhaps the most compelling part of Brenna’s message is that even if you want to lose weight or tone up or change your body for health reasons, you don’t have to hate yourself in the meantime. It’s incredibly empowering for women to accept, love and appreciate their bodies as they exist right now.
Ultimately, Brenna wants her future children to “grow up with more real images of bodies around them than I did,” and by encouraging the online world to share photos of their cellulite, rather than their airbrushed bodies, she’s well on the way to achieving that goal.