I Tried TikTok’s “Leggings Theory” and My Butt Has Never Looked Better

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Is it your butt . . . or is it just your leggings? This very question crossed my mind years ago while working out with a close friend. Although no two bodies will ever be exactly alike, we shared a similar body type, diet, and had been following the exact same glute-focused regimen for the past few months. The key difference? Her gym outfits were always on a completely different level. I’m talking impossibly flattering matching sets and butt-lifting leggings — the kind that put my sad, pilling bottoms to shame mid-RDL.

This admiration is not to discredit all the hard work my friend put into her physique — I witnessed it firsthand. But did she influence me to eventually purchase several pairs of my own butt-lifting leggings? Absolutely. And in my opinion, it did make a world of difference.

As it turns out, I’m not alone in this experience. “If you’re hitting the gym every day and you’re like, ‘Why does my butt not look like these Instagram models? I want to look like these Instagram models’ — it’s the clothes they’re wearing,” one creator said in a January TikTok with over 400K likes. Commenters were quick to chime in, crediting gym brands like DFYNE and Darc Sport for changing the way they perceive their glutes. “Yes, different clothes show different results,” one commenter wrote. “I have built my glutes for sure but DFYNE Impact is like makeup,” another said.

So does this viral “leggings theory” actually hold up in real life? To find out, I decided to put three pairs of my favorite butt-lifting gym leggings to the test. You know . . . for science. The following leggings were purchased at least a year ago (with my own money) and have all endured several real-life workouts. Based off of the comments in the original TikTok, I chose one set of control leggings and three categories of leggings from the gym brand NVGTN. The categories include: dark scrunch leggings, light scrunch leggings, and contour leggings. Read on to see how much of a difference your leggings actually make, plus some of my biggest takeaways.