Within the historical past of gluteal enhancement, Mexico City 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 technology of Mexico Metropolis buttock transformation luminaries, notably Ramón Cuenca-Guerra. In his 2004 paper “What Makes Buttocks Stunning?” Cuenca-Guerra laid out 4 traits that “decide enticing buttocks” in addition to the 5 kinds of “defects,” with methods for correcting every one. I, as an 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 apply, I tripped over Cuenca-Guerra’s methodology. How and by whom had the determinants been decided? Like this: 1,320 pictures of “nude ladies ages 20 to 35 years, as seen from behind” had been offered to a panel of six plastic surgeons, who “identified which buttocks they thought of enticing and harmonious, and options on which this attractiveness depended.” Oho!
I believed it will be fascinating to speak to Cuenca-Guerra concerning the notion of a visually perfect feminine determine. As one thing that would 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 electronic mail utilizing the deal with on a more moderen 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 capable of attain a colleague of his, José Luis Daza-Flores. Right here was the third technology; simply as Cuenca-Guerra had studied beneath González-Ulloa, Daza-Flores had studied beneath Cuenca-Guerra, extending the lineage and making Daza-Flores, I assume, “the son of buttock augmentation.”
Daza-Flores collaborated with Cuenca-Guerra on a paper known as “Calf Implants,” through which the staff did for the decrease leg what Cuenca-Guerra had achieved for the butt: laid out “the anatomical traits that make calves look enticing” and the “defects” to be addressed. Right here once more, plastic surgeons had been recruited to evaluate photos—2,600 of them, an enormous photographic millipede of feminine legs.
The paper took an sudden flip. Referring to a marked-up {photograph} of a decrease leg deemed enticing, 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 components such that the entire size divided by the lengthy half is the same as the lengthy half divided by the quick half, each these ratios might be 1.6 to 1. I discovered an illustration of the divine proportion on a web site known 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 “perfect” 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 ladies 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.
