Thigh Anxiety : Beauty: Rub in some magic cream and presto! Instant thinness. Just the solution millions of folks were clamoring for. But some say the best route is to get physical.
Imagine, if you will, the reaction if someone invented a miracle credit card that would send you home with a closetful of Gianni Versaces--and you’d never see a bill. Then you’d have some sense of the thunderous reception to last week’s news of a wondrous cream that may pare inches off a woman’s beleaguered thighs.
“I am absolutely astonished at the response,” Dr. Bruce Frome, the Los Angeles “marketing physician” associated with the cream, said in a statement. “My offices have been overwhelmed by inquiries from the media and requests for samples of the cream from people all over the world.”
Although you’ll have to wait at least another lifetime for your Versace card, the thigh-cream meisters could begin gearing up their mass-marketing machinery as early as next year. But here’s the biggest surprise: Not all women thrill to the prospect of Twiggy-like twigs.
As one woman in the appearance-bewitched entertainment industry, talent manager Juliet Green, put it: “No matter how good a shape you’re in, your thighs, when you hit 35, get a little soft, and there’s something really sick about trying to deny it.”
The thigh study was announced in Milwaukee at the annual meeting of the North American Assn. for the Study of Obesity. Dr. Frank Greenway, assistant clinical professor of internal medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. George Bray, director of Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, conducted a five-week study in which two groups of 12 women applied a daily teaspoon of a placebo cream on one thigh, and on the other, a cream made with aminophylline, an asthma medicine sold over the counter in pill form. One woman dropped out because of skin irritation, but the rest lost an average of 1/2 to 1 1/2 inches.
“It’s interesting, but statistically you can’t prove anything with a study that short and two groups that small,” said Dr. John B. McCraw, professor of plastic surgery at Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Frome, who gave financial backing to the study, said in the statement that if further tests confirm the preliminary research, the besieged doctors will go ahead with product development, possibly next year.
The doctors declined requests for interviews, referring questions to their new thigh-cream publicist, Laurelle Levine. She said the final formula may not require approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Levine said she came on board when the doctors’ offices were deluged with 1,000 calls and faxes from aspiring investors, distributors, marketers, manufacturers and women “dying for the cream.”
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Thigh news travels fast, thanks to the dynamite combination of magic and vanity. After all, thighs are a big deal in a woman’s life--often so big, in fact, that they produce a common female ailment known as Thigh Anxiety.
You’d think Mother Nature would have been kinder to her fellow females. But sadly, she endowed their upper gams with lipoprotein lipase in abundance, which does its annoying best to extract fatty acids from food and store them in fat cells.
Take most women’s tendency to carry weight in their thighs, add fashion’s merciless romance with Lycra and high hemlines, and you’ve got yourself one whopping international obsession. It’s thigh finance, a multimillion-dollar industry of videos, diets, books, surgery and cellulite creams. They all promise to stare down the inevitable, despite the medical caveat that the only sure way to spot-reduce saddlebags is to liposuck them. What makes the thigh-cream news different is the alluring prospect of painless slimming backed by scientific evidence.
And it makes Sally Smith angry.
“Researchers have been trying to answer ‘How do we make fat people thin?’ because they have a vested economic interest in it,” said the 325-pound director of the National Assn. to Advance Fat Acceptance. “We believe they should be asking, ‘How do we make fat people healthy?’ ”
If you ask Jean Young, a Santa Monica psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, women should just learn to love the one they’re with--themselves. Young says that thinness has historically been most fashionable in times when women have had the most power outside the home--witness the Rosie the Riveter ‘40s. And encouraging women to lust after thin thighs is a way of distracting them from their sometimes threatening tasks.
“One of the things that’s most insidious about our society’s desire to tamper with a woman’s satisfaction with her own body is it keeps her busy all the time,” Young said. “Now that women can be in the boardroom and on picket lines and having babies, we’re also so busy with our aerobic classes and facials and pedicures, who has time to get ahead? It’s a very oppressive maneuver that keeps women as enslaved as in the ‘50s, when they were at home in their aprons.”
Even if learning to love your less-than-Kate-Moss-like thighs requires more personal evolution than you can muster, consider thigh mistress Kathy Smith’s misgivings about surrendering to a possible saddlebag wonder cream.
“When people resort to a cream, they think, ‘I can still eat fat and not exercise and drink too much,’ ” said the woman behind the “Great Buns and Thighs” video. “It’s not making you a healthier person, even if it does work. The message I try to get across to people is, living a healthier lifestyle is not only for thinner thighs, but for more energy and a greater sense of self esteem.”
But if your time--and skirts--are short and you can’t wait for the cream, try the Phyllis Diller technique for instant thin thighs: “I think it would be quicker and more expeditious to have a large animal bite it off.”
