The mysterious mathematics behind the Brazilian butt lift

In history strengthening the glutes, Mexico City Stand out. He – she stands out. Here, in 1979, plastic surgeon Mario Gonzalez Ulloa fitted a pair of silicone implants specifically designed for the buttocks. textbook Body sculpting with silicone implants Gonzalez-Ulloa is called the “grandfather of buttock augmentation.” The early 2000s saw a new generation of Mexico City butt transformation stars, particularly Ramon Cuenca Guerra. In his 2004 paper titled “What Makes Buttocks Beautiful?” Cuenca Guerra has established four characteristics that “define attractive buttocks” as well as five types of “flaws,” with strategies for correcting each. I, for example, have a type 5 defect, “presbyopia.” (Gonzalez-Ulloa’s depiction of this takes the form of charcoal nudes that contrast the typical “happy butt”—high, round, and dimpled—with its low-slung “sad butt” counterpart.)

Although I understand the value of standardizing procedures and establishing guidelines for surgical practice, I stumbled upon Cuenca Guerra’s methodology. How and by whom were the determinants determined? Like this: 1,320 photographs of “naked women aged 20 to 35, as seen from behind” were submitted to a panel of six plastic surgeons, who “indicated which buttocks they considered attractive and toned, and the features on which this attractiveness depended.” Oh!

I thought it would be interesting to talk to Cuenca Guerra about the idea of ​​the visually perfect female character. As something that can or should be surgically created (or, in the case of senile buttocks, recreated). As something that even exists. I sent an email using the address found in a recent research paper. There was no response. Ramon Cuenca Guerra’s buttocks are in worse shape than mine. He died some time ago. I managed to reach a colleague of his, José Luis Daza Flores. Here was the third generation. Just as Cuenca Guerra studied under Gonzalez Ulloa, so Daza Flores studied under Cuenca Guerra, enlarging the proportions and making Daza Flores, I believe, “the son of buttock augmentation.”

Daza-Flores collaborated with Cuenca-Guerra on a paper titled “Calf Implants,” in which the team did for the lower leg what Cuenca-Guerra did for the buttocks: they identified “the anatomical features that make the calf look attractive” and the “defects” that needed to be addressed. Here again, plastic surgeons were appointed to judge the images, 2,600 of which were giant photographic worms of female legs.

The newspaper took an unexpected turn. Pointing to a distinctive image of the lower leg considered attractive, the authors tried to show that its measurements correspond to what is known in mathematics as the divine ratio (or golden ratio) – 1.6 (I round it) to 1. When you divide a line into two parts such that the full length divided by the long part equals the long part divided by the short part, these two ratios will be 1.6 to 1. I found an illustration of the divine ratio on a website called Math that is interesting (and does not convince anyone). The golden dividing line divides the length so that one piece is approximately two-thirds long and the other is approximately one-third long. The ancient Greeks divided the “ideal” face into similarly proportioned thirds. This was the first time I had seen Divine Proportion applied to a leg.

The paper contained sentences like these: “Seventeen women had thin, tube-shaped legs, with a ratio of only 1:1.618 in the AP and LL projections.” Although I admit to not understanding the details of the discussion, I believe this is a mathematically accurate description of grips.