in history In terms of gluteal growth, Mexico City stands out. it protrudesIt was here in 1979 that Mario Gonzalez-Ulloa, a plastic surgeon, first installed a pair of silicone implants designed specifically for the buttocks, textbook Body Sculpting with Silicone Implants Gonzalez-Ulloa is known as the “Father of Buttock Augmentation.” The early 2000s saw a new generation of buttock makeover veterans in Mexico City, notably Ramon Cuenca-Guerra. In their 2004 paper “What makes buttocks beautiful?” Cuenca-Guerra described four characteristics that “determine attractive buttocks” as well as five types of “flaws” with strategies to correct each. For example, I have Frailty Type 5, “Old Buttocks.” (González-Ulloa’s depictions took the form of charcoal nudes, contrasting “the typical ‘happy buttocks'” – high, round, dimpled – with its counterpart, the slouched, slouched “sad buttocks”.)
While I understand the value of standardizing procedures and setting guidelines for surgical practice, I tripped over Cuenca-Guerra’s methodology. How and by whom were the determinants determined? Like this: “1,320 photographs of nude women aged 20 to 35, as viewed from the back” were presented to a panel of six plastic surgeons, who “indicated which buttocks they considered attractive and harmonious, and on which characteristics this attractiveness depends.” Ooh!
I thought it would be interesting to talk to Cuenca-Guerra about the notion of the visually ideal female image. As something that can or should be surgically created (or, in the case of the aging buttocks, recreated). As something that even exists. I sent an email using the address of a recent journal paper. There was no answer. Ramon Cuenca-Guerra’s buttocks are in worse condition than mine. He has been dead for some time. I was able to reach one of his associates, Jose Luis Daza-Flores. Here was the third generation; Just as Cuenca-Guerra had studied under Gonzalez-Ulloa, Daza-Flores had studied under Cuenca-Guerra, expanding the lineage and making Daza-Flores, I think, “the son of buttock growth.”
Daza-Flores collaborated with Cuenca-Guerra on a paper titled “Calf implants”, in which the team did for the lower leg what Cuenca-Guerra did for the butt: “the physical characteristics that make calves attractive” and “defects” should be addressed. Here again, plastic surgeons were recruited to evaluate the images – 2,600 of them, a vast photographic millipede of female legs.
The newspaper took an unexpected turn. Referring to a marked photograph of a lower leg deemed attractive, the authors tried to show that its measurement corresponded to what is known in mathematics as the divine proportion (or golden ratio) – 1.6 (I’m rounding this off) to 1. When you divide a line into two parts such that the entire length divided by the longer part is equal to the longer part divided by the shorter part, then both of those ratios will be 1.6 to 1. I found an illustration of the divine proportion on a website called Math Is. Fun (and not convincing anyone). The golden dividing line divides the length so that one piece is approximately two-thirds and the other approximately one-third. The ancient Greeks divided the “ideal” face into equally proportioned thirds. This was the first time I had seen divine proportions applied to a leg.
The paper contained sentences like this: “The legs of seventeen women were thin, in the shape of a tube, and the AP and LL projections had a ratio of only 1:1.618.” Although I admit to not understanding the details of the discussion, I believe this to be a mathematically accurate description of the cankles.