I cannot stop thinking about the Skims Ultimate Pierced Nipple Push-Up Bra
The Ed Hardy tattoo shirt for your tits
Skims launched their “Ultimate Pierced Nipple Push-Up Bra” back in May 2025 and I am not sure a week has gone by since without me thinking about it. The pierced nipple bra has taken the whole enterprise of clothing-as-body-modification to its logical extreme, either simulating or duplicating an already superficial ornamentation to make female bodies even more malleable to the forces of heterosexual desirability. Even though I find it both depressing and bewildering, it’s also pretty fucking funny. Its absurdity somewhat softens the blow of the entire nihilistic project. We’ve gone full Lanthimos on lingerie.
People (men, lol) have long bemoaned the “false advertising” of heavy makeup, fake boobs1 and, classically, push-up bras. The irony is that the pressure to perform hyperfemininity stems from wanting to satisfy male desire in the first place. Really, all of these kinds of products are meant to help you get the look your body could not replicate without help. Many customers of the unpierced version of this bra would, and do, choose to permanently alter their breasts to make the performance more “real.” But the mere existence of the pierced version suggests that real piercings are a bridge too far.
The Ultimate Pierced Nipple Push-Up Bra campaign would have you believe that this bra is about attaining a kind of sexual desirability while avoiding pain. In the video advert, a buxom blonde enters a dive bar, shocking all the men present by her pierced nipples prominently pushing through her tank top. “There’s enough painful things about being a woman,” she says to camera (as if being continuously objectified by strange and sometimes violent men isn’t one of them). The tagline, “Get the ‘ooh’ without the ‘ouch’” emphasizes that this garment is meant for a wearer who wants to perform an aesthetic sensibility without embodying it, for an audience that never gets too close.
As someone with nipple piercings, I find this hilarious. It is strange to imagine that some women fantasize about paying someone tens of thousands of dollars to slice open their breasts and stuff them with silicone, but get squeamish about piercings. Piercings are literally not that big a deal. They are cheap, they are easy to get, they have almost no complications, and they are temporarily or even permanently removable, leaving little to no trace. You can even get them again if you change your mind. And unlike the sometimes catastrophic or even fatal outcomes of medical-grade beauty procedures carried out by unlicensed and untrained medspa staff,2 even the most “botched” piercing jobs done by adventurous 13-year-olds in bedrooms heal just fine. Having seen a friend’s face oozing over dinner after a fractional CO2 laser facial—a “minimally invasive” procedure, and one that is meant to be repeated many times—I assure you that nipple piercings are much less “ouch” than a radiation burn.3
The short term, superficial and minimal pain of piercings is nothing compared to the continuous pain women are either encouraged or even expected to subject themselves to in order to achieve normative desirability. Aesthetic medicine and its appurtenances, like Skims push-up bras, help you achieve what you’re “supposed” to look like, according to what men are “supposed” to want. Body piercings assert an embodiment that ignores, resists, or even intentionally runs counter to these pressures. What if your man doesn’t like them? What if your mom finds out? What if you change your mind? The pierced nipple bra gives you the “ooh” of cosplaying aesthetic autonomy without the “ouch” of making any material choices that could affect your social capital as a woman, which is to say, your fuckability.
To contextualize the pierced version, we have to look at the (unpierced) original. The Ultimate Nipple Push-Up Bra does what all of Kim Kardasian’s products are designed to do: optimize the performance of heteronormative sexuality. The nipple bra transforms your breasts into tits, padding them over, smoothing them out, pushing them up and topping them off with two perky nipple simulators centered on a dome of foam. Skims takes all the signifiers of sex in the female body, breaks them down to their constituent parts, then reshapes and repackages them for a consistent, predictable and purely visual performance.4 It’s the mass production model of sex-as-commodity, and for women who’ve bought into the idea that desirability gives them the highest ROI for their labor, it must be nice to have the option to wear your enhancements rather than go under the knife.
Speaking of prosthetics, for those who have heard a defense of the nipple bra as a possible prosthesis for mastectomy patients, you should not be surprised to learn that this is PR bullshit: mastectomy patients are generally unable to wear underwire bras. While doctors don’t actively forbid folks from wearing them after recovery, many find underwires too painful post-op. Brands like AnaOno that cater to breast surgery patients do not sell underwire bras at all. (Though they do sell bras that can accommodate actual breast prostheses, which is more than the Skims Fits Everybody Mastectomy Scoop Bralette can say.) And unlike AnaOno, whose mission statement says that they “celebrate what makes us different,” Skims is about reproducing a perfected form.
As Jia Tolentino observes in her 2019 New Yorker essay, “The Age of Instagram Face,” plastic surgery has shifted from taboo to expected for the elite, and is now attainable for the average person. With the post-COVID plastic surgery and MedSpa boom, aesthetic medical interventions now seem de rigueur. Jessica DeFino has long reported on the trend of post-op fashion aesthetics and celebrity surgery transparency. Meanwhile, the beauty industry slings products that suggest you can get the same look for less (money and pain).5
The rise of “radical transparency” in women’s aesthetic labor seems to be struggling to produce a new relationship to subjecthood within desirability that is aesthetically acceptable, easily commodifiable, and decidedly without teeth. Women in pop culture, and especially Team Kardashian, are embracing a kind of candor in their efforts to achieve normative beauty standards, as if being in on the joke were its own kind of power.
The knowing wink attempts to confer autonomy to the woman without challenging the underlying beauty ideal that circumscribes her decisions.
This all reminds me of a social media post where a woman lists out her many (very expensive!) plastic surgeries after a man on the street compliments her by calling her a “natural beauty.” The knowing wink attempts to confer autonomy to the woman without challenging the underlying beauty ideal that circumscribes her decisions.
“They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” the man claims, to which the poster quips, “Yes they do. They make ‘em down at Matty’s MediSpa with a needle and a fucking scalpel.” By positioning the man, with his clear misapprehension about what women actually look like, as an ingenuous idiot, the woman gets to reject him, his desire, and the idea that his desire is why she got all these mods in the first place. And while we can all get a wry chuckle at the expense of his deluded fantasy, it doesn’t change the fact that this fantasy is actually why anyone goes to these extremes at all.
A lot of this rhetoric reminds me of the Ameglian Major Cow in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe that was genetically modified to want to be eaten. The joke that we’re all in on here trivializes the money and physical trauma of aesthetic interventions, from laser facials to eyelash implants to Botox injections to “445cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle silicone implants.”6 This all trickles down from the way Kim Kardashian routinely undergoes radical plastic surgeries to maintain cultural relevance while eliding the reality that she is cutting her body open over and over and over again, as if medical precision negates the violence of the act.
The entire goal of aesthetic medicine is to move you closer to an ideal that could not be realized without erasing the idiosyncrasies of your own body and desires. Women get these procedures to turn themselves into an object, to be a “copy-paste”7 version of what, supposedly, everyone (every man) wants. They further abstract you from yourself. And because they are meant to be “undetectable,” the trauma of the experience—the cutting, the bruising, the swelling, the scarring—is hidden. You can pretend it didn’t even happen, and up until this recent post-op transparency trend, you were supposed to. And in pulling this sleight of hand you can pretend that it was an empowering decision, a knowing wink. You want to be eaten.
Women get these procedures to turn themselves into an object, to be a “copy-paste” version of what, supposedly, everyone (every man) wants.
Piercings, tattoos and other body mods are adornments. They are meant to be visible and have social and physical ramifications. They generate friction. Like most things having to do with the body, they can be kind of annoying. They shrink, they swell, they get infected. I can no longer use my favorite waffle weave bath towels8 because it hurts like a bitch when my piercings snag. I am often asked by people who do not have tattoos if they were painful. Some of my choices are, in certain industries, job killers. They make me harder to swallow.
By masquerading as a chance to “wear” nipple piercings instead of having them, the Skims Ultimate Pierced Nipple Push-Up Bra evacuates piercings of their meaning. There’s nothing at stake, and so there’s also really no point to them. If I wanted to push my tinfoil hat further down onto my head, I could take this as part of an ongoing attempt to appropriate and defang the project of bodily autonomy entirely. To say that look! none of this matters. Your body is infinitely malleable in the service of consumability, to be shaped and reshaped into a perfect bolus by the mouth of consumer desires. All you are is meat—don’t you want to be delicious?
If this ridiculous object accomplishes anything, I hope it helps us talk more about the things we do to ourselves for each other. To hold ourselves with tenderness over the choices we sometimes want or feel like we have to make, and to hold each other accountable when we do dumb shit like this. They say the best teacher is pain, but the best medicine is laughter. And like any good Skims sale, this one’s a two-fer.
Though I just started watching Real Housewives of SLC and found the way the husbands talk about their wives’ bodies, particularly their tits, interesting/horrifying. It’s as if the artificiality of the augmentation pushes them into pure object status, making it okay for all onlookers to comment very publicly on them: “I want my wife to have a pair like that!” The husbands also probably paid for the procedures, which would add an extra layer of entitlement. We hate it here!!
They’re cheaper, too—my piercings were $200 with jewelry and tip. My brother’s ex’s facial cost him over two grand. Though it does make one wonder about tipping culture in a MedSpa…
Candice Wuehle’s article Anti-Porn, Post-Body (and Bimbo Summit: A Pop Culture Study in general) is required reading for all you cyborgian manifesters.
Fr please read and subscribe to FLESH WORLD by Jessica DeFino RIGHT NOW. Here are some great places to start: 1 2 3
As Kylie Jenner helpfully shared about her new tits. Thanks (I guess) to DeFino and Emily Kirkpatrick’s podcast, “Should We Take Ugly Women Seriously?”
I owe this fun little phrase to Mikala Jamison’s reporting on “The long con of Pilates culture” through her newsletter, Body Type.
This is actually devastating so please, do DM or comment with your towel recs.
The piercing bra and bush thong are stolen valor
i’m obsessed with this!! makes me think about how jacob elordi’s eyebrow piercing in saltburn was controversial not between the director and actor but with the producer because it was seen as more part of the character development than just jewelry. bc of that his piercing is prosthetic, which is ironic to think of as being something of controversy bc in frankenstein with heavy prosthetics he was casted as what onscreen seemed like a monster in the body of a supermodel lol which is all kind of cyborg manifesting to me. i’m so interested in seeing where piercing trends, clothing-as-body-modification, and prosthetics culture goes <3