Lifestyle

ANYTHING BUTT THAT

Grammy Winner Reveals Details of Her ‘Reverse’ Brazilian Butt Lift

The rapper and singer responded to plastic surgery accusations about her curves.

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

PublishedMar 12, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT

UpdatedMar 12, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT

Updated Mar 12, 2026, 5:00 PM EDTPublished Mar 12, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT

Grammy-winning artist Doja Cat is clearing the air about her history with plastic surgery.

The 30-year-old singer and rapper, whose real name is Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini, decided to dispel rumors on social media that she had undergone a Brazilian butt lift.

The popular yet dangerous procedure, colloquially known as a BBL, involves transferring a patient’s own fat from one area (often the stomach or thighs) to another (usually the buttocks) to enhance its curvature.

Doja Cat, however, insists she underwent a “reverse” version of the procedure. And the goal wasn’t to make her butt bigger, she said, but to actually reduce her hip-to-butt ratio.

“I just had the craziest epiphany,” Doja Cat said in a new video posted to TikTok. The revelation: her mother may have lipedema, meaning it likely runs in her family and could be the cause of her lifelong struggle with cellulite.

Lipedema is a chronic condition that primarily affects the lower body, though it can also affect the arms. It causes fat buildup that can appear lumpy, typically in the thighs, buttocks, and calves, which is not eased with weight loss. It may be inherited, as over 20 percent of cases have a family history of the condition.

Its symptoms aren’t merely aesthetic—lipedema can be painful, too, causing sensitivity and tenderness. It is also thought to be connected to hormones due to its higher prevalence amongst women, usually starting or worsening during puberty, pregnancy, and menopause.

In the video, Doja explained that she felt uncomfortable with the amount of attention people paid to her curves—a struggle that began in her early teens, when people would catcall her in public. “I always thought like, ‘d--n, what’s wrong with me,’” she recalled.

“It wasn’t a horrible thing, but it stuck out, and I didn’t like it—I had a big butt and a little waist,” Doja said. “I always thought that it was cellulite,” she added, revealing that she ultimately chose to undergo liposuction on the lower half of her body a few years ago.

“I got lipo on my thighs, on the back of my thighs, my hips and above my butt on my lower back,” she said, noting that she did not touch her rear at the time, but regretted the choice after.

“My butt was so f-----g big, and I had these little thighs, and I had to go back in because I had way too much a-- it looked like a diaper. It looked like I had a BBL, but I didn’t have a BBL. I had a reverse BBL essentially,” she said.

The multiple rounds of liposuction left the rapper with sagging skin—a side effect that may have been caused or exacerbated by lipedema.

“Now I have from all of the history extra skin, so I think some people have noticed in videos or performances that my butt looks kind of weird, and that’s due to all of the extra skin,” she said.

“I love wearing thights because it keeps all of that together. It’s a slippery slope, liposuction and things like that, but I guess it’s just lymphatic build-up and there’s a lot of things you can do to help with that,” she said.

Doja said she could now see the condition in older videos. “You can see it in Juicy,” she said, referencing her music video from 2019.

“If you look at my knees, like I had big ass knees, like big fat f------g knees,“ she said. “I wasn’t...overweight or anything, I was just building up all this a-- and ankle and calf and knee and thigh, I had a whole ton of it.”

After comparing her older photos to reference pictures of lipedema, she suspected she was in the early stages of the progressive condition. “You go from stage one to four. I was probably at like stage one or stage two,” she said.

In the comments, Doja’s fans were grateful that she was talking about the condition, which affects an estimated 1 in 72,000 people, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Some said that the Juicy music video helped them accept their bodies, and one fan wrote, “When I first found out about lipedema and looked at my legs, I cried. If Doja has lipedema, maybe I’ll be alright.”

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast.