The Mysterious Math Behind the Brazilian Butt Carry

Within the historical past of gluteal enhancement, Mexico Metropolis stands out. It protrudes. It was right here, in 1979, {that a} plastic surgeon, Mario González-Ulloa, first put in a pair of silicone implants designed particularly for the buttocks. The textbook Physique Sculpting with Silicone Implants calls González-Ulloa the “grandfather of buttock augmentation.” The early 2000s noticed a brand new era of Mexico Metropolis buttock transformation luminaries, notably Ramón Cuenca-Guerra. In his 2004 paper “What Makes Buttocks Lovely?” Cuenca-Guerra laid out 4 traits that “decide engaging buttocks” in addition to the 5 kinds of “defects,” with methods for correcting each. I, for example, have defect sort 5, the “senile buttock.” (González-Ulloa’s depiction of this took the type of charcoal nudes contrasting “the standard ‘completely happy buttock’”—excessive, rounded, dimpled—with its counterpart, the low-slung, drooping “unhappy buttock.”)

Whereas I perceive the worth of standardizing procedures and setting tips for surgical follow, I tripped over Cuenca-Guerra’s methodology. How and by whom had the determinants been decided? Like this: 1,320 images of “nude girls ages 20 to 35 years, as seen from behind” have been offered to a panel of six plastic surgeons, who “identified which buttocks they thought-about engaging and harmonious, and options on which this attractiveness depended.” Oho!

I believed it could be fascinating to speak to Cuenca-Guerra concerning the notion of a visually superb feminine determine. As one thing that might or needs to be surgically created (or, within the case of the senile buttock, re-created). As one thing that even exists. I despatched an e-mail utilizing the tackle on a newer journal paper. There was no reply. Ramón Cuenca-Guerra’s buttocks are in worse form than mine. He has been lifeless for a while. I used to be in a position to attain a colleague of his, José Luis Daza-Flores. Right here was the third era; simply as Cuenca-Guerra had studied underneath González-Ulloa, Daza-Flores had studied underneath Cuenca-Guerra, extending the lineage and making Daza-Flores, I suppose, “the son of buttock augmentation.”

Daza-Flores collaborated with Cuenca-Guerra on a paper referred to as “Calf Implants,” wherein the group did for the decrease leg what Cuenca-Guerra had finished for the butt: laid out “the anatomical traits that make calves look engaging” and the “defects” to be addressed. Right here once more, plastic surgeons have been recruited to guage photographs—2,600 of them, an enormous photographic millipede of feminine legs.

The paper took an surprising flip. Referring to a marked-up {photograph} of a decrease leg deemed engaging, the authors tried to indicate that its measurements conformed to what’s identified in arithmetic because the divine proportion (or golden ratio)—1.6 (I’m rounding it off) to 1. Once you divide a line into two elements such that the entire size divided by the lengthy half is the same as the lengthy half divided by the brief half, each these ratios can be 1.6 to 1. I discovered an illustration of the divine proportion on an internet site referred to as Math Is Enjoyable (and convincing nobody). The golden dividing line splits the size such that one chunk is roughly two-thirds and the opposite is round one-third. The traditional Greeks divided the “superb” face into equally proportioned thirds. This was the primary time I’d seen the divine proportion utilized to a leg.

The paper contained sentences like this: “Seventeen girls had skinny legs, within the form of a tube, and a mere 1:1.618 ratio within the A-P and L-L projections.” Although I confess to not greedy the particulars of the dialogue, I imagine that to be a mathematically exact description of cankles.