Hip dips don’t do anything. They have no functional purpose, no impact on how you move, and no connection to your fitness level or health. They’re simply a visible contour created by the normal shape of your skeleton, specifically the space between your pelvis and the top of your thigh bone. Everyone has this skeletal structure; whether it shows on the surface depends on your bone proportions and how fat and muscle sit over them.
What Creates the Indentation
Hip dips, sometimes called “violin hips,” are the inward curve that appears just below the hip bones and above the upper thigh. The shape comes from two bony landmarks sitting at slightly different widths from your body’s center line.
The first curve comes from the ilium, the wide, wing-shaped bone at the top of your pelvis. This is the bone you can feel jutting out below your waist. The second curve comes from the greater trochanter, the bony knob at the top of your thigh bone (femur) where it connects into the hip socket. Between these two points, the body naturally curves inward because there’s less bone pushing outward. Several muscles attach in this zone, including your largest glute muscle and the outer thigh muscle, but the depression itself is dictated by bone, not by how developed those muscles are.
Three skeletal measurements determine how visible your hip dips are: hip width, the length of the femoral neck (the angled section connecting the ball of the femur to the shaft), and the size of the greater trochanter. If your ilium flares out more than average relative to where your femur sits, the dip between them becomes more pronounced. None of these measurements are something you can change through exercise or diet.
Why Exercise Won’t Eliminate Them
A persistent claim online is that building muscle in the glutes and outer thighs can “fill in” hip dips. Muscle mass and fat distribution can slightly change how deep the indentation looks, but they don’t cause it and can’t erase it. The underlying shape is skeletal. You could have extremely well-developed glute and thigh muscles and still have visible hip dips, because the muscles in that region attach to the bone in thin, tendon-like layers rather than forming a thick pad of tissue over the depression.
Gaining or losing body fat can also shift how noticeable hip dips appear, since subcutaneous fat can smooth over the contour. But where your body stores fat is largely genetic, and there’s no way to direct fat gain to one specific spot.
How Common They Are
Hip dips are a normal anatomical variation, not a medical condition or a deficiency. Everyone has the same space between the ilium, hip socket, and greater trochanter. The difference between someone with visible hip dips and someone without them is simply how their particular skeleton is proportioned, plus how much soft tissue covers the area. The terms “hip dips” and “violin hips” were coined by fitness influencers and social media, not by the medical community. No doctor would consider them a diagnosis or a problem.
They appear more often in women because female pelvises tend to be wider, which can make the gap between the ilium and the femur more visible. Men can have them too.
Cosmetic Procedures That Exist
Because hip dips are purely cosmetic, the only way to significantly change their appearance is through surgery. The most common procedure is fat redistribution (liposculpting), where fat is suctioned from another part of the body and injected into the trochanteric depression to smooth the outer hip contour. Artificial fillers and solid silicone implants are also used as alternatives to fat grafts.
Results from fat grafting are unpredictable. Between 30 and 70 percent of the injected fat gets reabsorbed by the body within the first year, which means a second procedure is often needed. Full results take about six months to appear. Common side effects include bruising, swelling, pain at the injection and removal sites, fat migration, dimpling, and scarring. Infections are rare but possible.
These procedures carry the same risks as any elective surgery, and there’s no guarantee the final result will match expectations. For most people, hip dips are simply part of their body’s natural shape, as unremarkable as having wider or narrower shoulders.