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 enticing buttocks” in addition to the 5 sorts of “defects,” with methods for correcting each. I, as an example, have defect kind 5, the “senile buttock.” (González-Ulloa’s depiction of this took the type of charcoal nudes contrasting “the everyday ‘completely satisfied buttock’”—excessive, rounded, dimpled—with its counterpart, the low-slung, drooping “unhappy buttock.”)
Whereas I perceive the worth of standardizing procedures and setting pointers 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 ladies ages 20 to 35 years, as seen from behind” have been introduced to a panel of six plastic surgeons, who “identified which buttocks they thought-about enticing and harmonious, and options on which this attractiveness depended.” Oho!
I assumed it will be attention-grabbing to speak to Cuenca-Guerra in regards to the notion of a visually ideally suited 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 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 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 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 referred to as “Calf Implants,” during which the crew did for the decrease leg what Cuenca-Guerra had carried out 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 have been recruited to guage photographs—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 point out 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 quick 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 “ideally suited” 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.