Let's Talk Legs

Writer April Long tracks her journey to pin perfection

- April Long

There were, in retrospect, a few indications that maybe my legs were never exactly spectacular. The time, for example, my Jordan Catalanoesque school crush looked me up and down and said, “You don’t have calves. You have cows.” Or the moment my sister and I, teenagers on our first trip to Europe, stood in front of Michelangelo’s “David”, admiring the statue’s magnificent physique, and she said, “He has legs like yours.” Then, clocking my confusion: “You have legs like a man.”

Still, I never felt so much as a shadow of insecurity about my lower limbs. What mattered to me was what they could do: I was the fastest runner in my grade; I could swim further and climb higher than virtually anyone else I knew. If asked, I would have said I looked pretty fetching in a mini-skirt, even though I recognised that my solidly built legs possessed an entirely different aesthetic than the slender, perfectly shaped gams of my mother and sister.

I didn’t particularly mind when, in my early thirties, the skin on my shins began to testify to decades of SPF denial with a sprinkling of freckles, or even when I saw the first wrinkle creasing my kneecap like a permanent wink (that’s going to happen to leg hinges, right?). But then one day I found myself in the unforgiving fluorescent glare of a department store change room, trying on a thigh-skimming dress, and realised that something more nefarious had happened: it was as if some mass from the upper part of my thigh had gone fwump – and landed on my patella. I peered closer. Were those dimples? I pinched and pulled, feeling a twinge of panic. Is knee cellulite even a thing?