Hip dips are inward curves or indentations on the sides of your body, sitting just below your hip bone and above your upper thigh. If you’re wondering whether you have them, the answer is straightforward: everyone has the anatomical structure that creates hip dips, but how visible they are varies from person to person based on your skeleton, muscle, and fat distribution.
Where to Look on Your Body
Stand in front of a mirror in form-fitting clothing or after a shower. Look at the area between the top of your hip bone and the point where your thigh begins. If you see an inward dip or curve rather than a smooth, outward-rounding line from waist to thigh, those are hip dips. They’re sometimes called “violin hips” because the silhouette resembles the curves of a violin.
The indentation sits at a very specific spot. Your hip bone (the top of your pelvis) creates one high point, and the wider part of your upper thigh creates another. The dip appears in the gap between those two points, roughly level with the upper portion of your buttocks. It can be subtle or quite pronounced, and it often looks more obvious from certain angles, particularly when viewed straight on from the front.
Why Some People Have More Visible Hip Dips
Everyone has a space between the top of the pelvis, the hip socket, and the bony knob at the top of the thighbone. Whether that space shows up as a visible dip depends on several factors that are largely outside your control.
Three skeletal measurements matter most: the width of your pelvis, the length of the short segment of bone connecting your thighbone to the hip socket (femoral neck length), and the size of the bony prominence at the top of your thighbone. A broader pelvis that sits high relative to the thighbone tends to create a more dramatic drop between those two landmarks, making the dip more visible. Someone with a narrower pelvis or a thighbone that connects higher up will have a smoother outer contour.
Fat and muscle distribution play a secondary role. If you carry more soft tissue in that specific zone between the hip bone and thigh, the dip gets filled in and appears shallower. If you carry less, the underlying skeletal shape shows through more clearly. This is why hip dips can look slightly different at different body weights, even though the bone structure underneath hasn’t changed at all.
Hip Dips vs. Saddlebags
These two terms describe completely different things, but they get confused often. Hip dips are indentations, not bulges. They’re the result of bone structure creating a concave curve on the side of your body. Saddlebags are pockets of fat on the outer thigh, located lower on the body, roughly level with the lower buttocks where the leg meets the glutes.
The easiest way to tell them apart: hip dips curve inward, saddlebags push outward. Hip dips sit higher on the body than saddlebags. And while saddlebags can change significantly with weight fluctuations, hip dips are anchored to your skeletal shape.
Can Exercise Change Them?
Not in the way social media often implies. Because hip dips are created by the gap between bones, no amount of targeted exercise will reshape the skeleton. What exercise can do is build muscle volume in the gluteus medius (the muscle that covers the side of the hip) and surrounding areas, which may slightly soften the appearance of the indentation by adding tissue over it. The underlying dip remains.
Strength training for the glutes and outer hips is worthwhile for plenty of reasons, including joint stability and overall function. But if you’re doing side-lying leg raises specifically to “fix” hip dips, it helps to have realistic expectations. For most people, the change in appearance from muscle building alone is modest.
They’re a Normal Part of Your Skeleton
Hip dips are not a flaw, a sign of being out of shape, or a medical concern. They’re a predictable result of how the human pelvis and femur are shaped, and the degree of visibility is determined by genetics. The width and angle of your pelvis, the way your thighbone connects to the hip socket, and how your pelvis developed during growth all contribute to your unique contour. Two people at the same height, weight, and fitness level can have very different hip profiles simply because their skeletons are built differently.
If you can see that inward curve below your hip bone when you look in the mirror, you have visible hip dips. If you can’t, the underlying anatomy is still there, just filled in by more soft tissue. Either way, it’s simply how your body is structured.