The once much talked about trend of anal bleaching really seems to have fallen off the radar in recent years.
A decade ago, you wouldn’t have been able to open a women’s magazine without reading about it. Five years ago the procedure was being referenced Bridesmaids.
But where is it now and do people still actually do it?
Desperate to know what's going on in the world, I turned to Madison Missina, Mamamia's resident sex guru and pornstar, in search of answers.
According to Missina and the Melbourne clinic I spoke to, yes, it very much is still a thing. The difference now being, according to Missina, is that over the years products have improved and at-home bleaching is now far more common.
"It's gone from being something that you'll go to a salon for or to see a doctor about, and more into something you do at home," Missina said, explaining, "It's quite an intimate and personal thing, and if you can do that at home it's understandable people are probably going to want to do that."
Missina - who works as a pornstar and sex and relationship therapist - says that overwhelmingly, the process of anal bleaching is far more common among women than it is men.
"Women are more aware," Missina says. "We're more taught to be so focussed on our bodies and make sure we can improve certain parts. And that's a dynamic we don't really see across men."
According to some experts, anal bleaching began to rise in popularity around the same time Brazilian waxing became more commonplace. Because the more of their genitals women could see, the more uncomfortable they became around their skin colouring. But according to Missina, there's one major problem with this.
"Some women have pink nipples and some women have brown nipples," she explains, adding, "and that's the same with our genitals. Some of us will have a brown tinge and some of us will have a pink tinge, it's just a naturally occurring thing. But there's a common misconception that bleaching will turn the brown skin colour into the pink skin colour, and I don't see that that's the results that it's getting," she says.
"As we age our body will start to collect pigments in certain areas," Missina says. "Usually in areas that are exposed to a lot of friction. So obviously, our genital areas will change that colour over time because of the friction that comes from wearing our underwear."
So basically, if you're bleaching to try and remove pigmentation, you're likely to have some success. If you're bleaching to try and change the actual colour of your skin, though, you'll have some trouble.
Listen: Madison Missina discusses the rules of anal sex on The Prude and the Pornstar.
According to one clinic, the process should not hurt. The products have come a long way, and despite having the word "bleach" included in it, are incredibly soft on the skin. Kind of like teeth whitening products.
Hahaha are you kidding? Please, nothing good lasts forever. Not the Obamas in the White House, and not the porcelain tint of your butt hole.
Try as you might to rid yourself of your skin's pigmentation, it is a natural process of the body. And because of that, it means that sooner or later (it's really variant on every person), the pigmentation will return.
"Like botox," Missina says, "it will work for a while, but part of your body's natural process is to produce wrinkles, so eventually the product stops working and the wrinkles return. Bleaching is exactly the same because pigmentation is a natural process."
A question for the ages, perhaps, and one that offers answers that are as personal as they are broad.
"As women, we can't escape pictures of very young women with almost teenager bodies as the ideal," Missina says. "If you look at a woman's body when she's 20, you're not going to see pigments, you're not going to see droopy breasts, you're not going to see wrinkles or stretch marks, and they're all of the things that surgery and cosmetic procedures like bleaching tackle."
The problem, though, Missina says, is that "women are being told it's not okay to age and get the stretch marks and have the discoloration on parts of their bodies, so they're purchasing these products to live up to that ideal. It's an ideal that really, almost doesn't exist, and while we shouldn't be living up to it, it's unrealistic to say that because the reality is that we live in a world where we have so many messages us telling us to hate ourselves."
The most important thing to consider before bleaching, Missina says, is if it's really something you need to fix or if you are actually okay as you are right now.
