Hormone-laced pills given to poultry to pump up their breasts and thighs. Apparently, young girls of West Indian extraction were for a time swallowing these in order to expand their arses and there was a minor moral panic about it.
I first heard about this practice in 2011 when I read in the Hackney Gazette that an aspiring glamour model named Claudia Aderotimi of Stoke Newington had recently died after flying out to Philadelphia to have a back-street piece of cosmetic surgery done on her. Specifically, some struck off vet who moonlighted as a drag queen (yes, really) stuck a needle full of industrial silicone into each buttock to give her a booty of which Sir Mix-a-lot would approve. This slightly killed her. Anyhow. It turned out that the reason that she had done this was because she believed that if she had a larger bottom she'd get more work in hip hop music videos, and then someone mentioned that it used to be the case that girls in Jamaica and of Jamaican parentage used to swallow these agricultural supplements in the hope of a larger bottom, risking all manner of side effects, and which probably wouldn't have worked anyhow because avian hormones don't necessarily work with human anatomy. And unscrupulous farmers' merchants and/or the music industry was doing this to YOUR CHILDREN. You can panic now.
(It should be noted that in the Caribbean there is a somewhat different ideal of feminine beauty to in Europe. I am informed that, there, it is preferred to have a woman who's nice and Rubenesque because if you have a "maga" - Jamaican patois for thin, from "meagre" - girl friend you're not feeding her properly and thus by extension can't support her.)
Thing is, I'm not sure I believe this to be the case. On the one hand, yes, men and women both have over the years done really weird things to achieve ideals of beauty and suchlike - foot binding comes to mind here, as does the sort of psychotic corsetry that was in vogue in Europe in the 18th century (and from where the "heaving bosoms" effect came from). And for a more modern perspective, in those godawful celebrity magazines we hear about some no-account WAG or reality TV person who's gone on an extreme juice diet. Not to mention the glorification of anorexia that exists in the fashion industry. However, from a purely objective viewpoint, I have never seen a single account of anyone actually doing this that pre-dates the above tale of Claudia Aderotimi. A lot of it is referred to in the form of unsourced statements that all echo-chamber off each other second or third hand. Indeed, the earliest mention of this I've found is an article in The Voice from 2005.
What I probably suspect is that some time ago a journalist or suchlike encountered one or two people who tried this and span it to his editor as something that was routinely going on and thus could make a good You Can Panic Now story. And it's snowballed from there.
What does happen, and I have seen this sold over the internets and in iffy magazines, is that there are companies that will sell you herbal concoctions that purport to expand your posterior, usually in pill form. These are different entirely. They go by names like Star Curves and Gluteboost and Bootymax and contain various herbs and things. They are flogged on various webshites websites with walls of text, copywritten testimonials, and obviously photoshopped before and after pictures. Apparently this bunch of random herbs and things will "redirect and transfer your fat into your buttocks. The rest of your body will not gain weight! It will give you that hour glass figure that all women desire for their body's." How this is possible without surgery I have no idea. On the plus side, unlike popping agricultural hormones, these things won't hurt you. However they are still abject woo and best avoided because they're not cheap.
(IN1311)