The days of sucking in stomach fat are slimming down as New York women replace their Spanx with a forgotten, old-school device: the Colombian faja.
The faja, a girdle-like contraption used by recovering liposuction patients in the 1970s to minimize swelling, is now finding new life squeezing women of all races who want a classic hourglass figure, The New York Times reported.
“You see the love handles?” asked Blanca Murillo, 33, an avid faja user for the past seven years. “With this, you hide it.”
Fajas are now available for women and men in a range of materials, varying levels of constriction, and different figurations to squeeze certain areas of the body while leaving others free to breathe.
Why the upsurge in what is essentially a Victorian-era corset? America’s obesity rate has something to do with it.
“There’s this radical disjunction between an ideal, which is slender and muscular, and a reality that more and more people are dramatically overweight,” said Valerie Steele, the author of “The Corset: A Cultural History,” in an interview with the Times.
The unexpected payoff in this process is that many women ultimately end up losing weight because they lose their appetite as the faja’s tight material squeezes — well, everything.