Teh Mysterious Math Behind the Brazilian Butt Lift
The quest for the “ideal” female form has fueled a booming industry in cosmetic surgery,and nowhere is this more evident than in the world of buttock augmentation.While often associated with Brazil, the foundations of this practise – and the surprisingly rigid standards defining a desirable posterior – were laid decades ago in Mexico City. It began with surgeon Mario González-Ulloa, who in the 1960s first implanted silicone designed specifically for the buttocks. He earned the title “grandfather of buttock augmentation” according to the textbook Body Sculpting with Silicone Implants.
By the early 2000s, a new generation of surgeons were refining the art, most notably Ramón Cuenca-Guerra. In a 2004 paper, “What Makes Buttocks Beautiful?” Cuenca-Guerra attempted to codify attractiveness, outlining four characteristics that “determine attractive buttocks” and identifying five distinct “defects” with corresponding corrective strategies. He even categorized a particular downturn as “defect type 5,” the “senile buttock,” visually contrasted in González-Ulloa’s work with the “happy buttock”-high, rounded, and dimpled.
However, the methodology behind these determinations proved unsettling. Cuenca-Guerra’s standards weren’t born from global consensus, but from subjective judgment. His research involved presenting 1,320 photographs of nude women aged 20 to 35, viewed from behind, to a panel of just six plastic surgeons. These surgeons “pointed out which buttocks they considered attractive and harmonious, and features on which this attractiveness depended.”
The pursuit of mathematically defining beauty didn’t stop at the buttocks. Cuenca-Guerra, alongside colleague José Luis Daza-Flores (who studied under him, becoming, as one observer put it, “the son of buttock augmentation”), extended their focus to the lower leg. Their paper, “Calf Implants,” mirrored the approach taken with the buttocks, identifying “the anatomical characteristics that make calves look attractive” and the “defects” requiring correction. This involved another extensive visual survey – 2,600 images of female legs, scrutinized by plastic surgeons.
The research took an unexpected turn when the authors attempted to link these perceived ideals to the “divine proportion,” also known as the golden ratio (approximately 1.6 to 1). This mathematical concept, where the ratio of the whole to the larger part is the same as the larger part to the smaller part, has been historically applied to art and architecture, including the proportions of the “ideal” face in ancient Greek aesthetics. The authors sought to demonstrate that attractive legs conformed to this ratio.
the paper included statements like, “Seventeen women had thin legs, in the shape of a tube, and a mere 1:1.618 ratio in the A-P and L-L projections,” a description that, according to one interpretation, precisely describes cankles. While the specifics remain complex, the attempt to quantify beauty through mathematical formulas highlights the lengths to which surgeons have gone to standardize and surgically achieve a visually “ideal” female figure – a figure defined not by nature, but by the subjective preferences of a small group of surgeons.
