The mysterious math behind the Brazilian butt lift
in history Mexico City excels in gluteal strengthening. it is protruding. It was here, in 1979, that a plastic surgeon named Mario Gonzalez-Ulloa installed the first pair of silicone implants designed specifically for the buttocks. textbook Body sculpting with silicone implants Gonzalez-Ulloa calls it the “grandfather of butt augmentation.” The early 2000s saw a new generation of hip-shaping luminaries in Mexico City, notably Ramón Cuenca-Guerra. In his 2004 article “What Makes a Hip Beautiful?” Cuenca-Guerra presented four characteristics that “determine attractive hips” as well as five types of “flaws” with strategies to correct each. For example, I have a type 5 defect, “aging hip.” (González-Ulloa’s depiction of this was in charcoal nudes, contrasting the typical “happy butt”—long, round, dimpled—with its counterpart, the low-hanging, droopy “sad butt.”)
While I understand the value of standardizing procedures and setting surgical guidelines, I questioned Cuenca-Guerra’s methods. How and by whom are the determining factors determined? Here’s how: 1,320 photos of “naked women aged 20 to 35, as seen from behind” were presented to a panel of six plastic surgeons who “indicated which hips they found attractive and well-proportioned and the features on which that attractiveness depended.” oh
I thought it would be interesting to talk to Cuenca-Guerra about the concept of a visually ideal female figure. As something that can or must be surgically created (or recreated in the case of an aging hip). As something that even exists. I sent an email using the address in a more recent journal article. There was no response. Ramon Cuenca-Guerra’s butt is worse than mine. He has been dead for some time. I was able to reach one of his colleagues, Jose Luis Daza Flores. This was the third generation. Just as Cuenca-Guerra had studied under González-Ulloa, so too had Daza-Flores studied under Cuenca-Guerra, expanding the lineage, making Daza-Flores, I guess, “the butt-raising boy.”
Daza-Flores collaborated with Cuenca-Guerra on a paper called “Calf Planting,” in which the team did for the leg what Cuenca-Guerra had done for the hip: “anatomical features that make calves attractive” and “inaccuracies” that need to be addressed. Here again, plastic surgeons were hired to judge the images—2,600 of them, thousands of vast photographs of women’s legs.
The newspaper took an unexpected turn. Pointing to a marked-up photograph of a lower leg that looked attractive, the authors tried to show that its dimensions corresponded to what is known in mathematics as the divine ratio (or golden ratio) – 1.6 (I’m rounding it) to 1. When you divide a line into two parts so that the total length divided by the longest part equals 1. 1. I found an illustration of the divine proportion on a website called Math Is Fun (and it didn’t convince anyone). The golden dividing line divides the length so that one piece is about two-thirds and the other about one-third. The ancient Greeks divided the “ideal” face into thirds of similar proportions. This was the first time I had ever seen the Divine Proportion applied to a leg.
The article contained statements such as: “Seventeen women had thin, tube-shaped legs with a ratio of 1:1.618 in the AP and LL ridges.” Although I admit that I do not understand the details of the argument, I believe that this is an accurate mathematical description of the candlestick.
