In history buttocks improvement, Mexico stands out. This sticks out. It was here in 1979 that plastic surgeon Mario González-Ulloa first installed a pair of silicone implants designed specifically for the buttocks. Manual Body modeling with silicone implants calls González-Ulloa “the grandfather of butt augmentation.” The early 21st century saw the emergence of a up-to-date generation of butt transformation luminaries from Mexico, most notably Ramón Cuenca-Guerra. In his 2004 article “What Makes Buttocks Beautiful?” Cuenca-Guerra outlined four characteristics that “define attractive buttocks,” as well as five types of “flaws,” along with strategies to correct each of them. For example, I have a type 5 defect, i.e. “senile buttock”. (González-Ulloa presented this in the form of a nude in charcoal, contrasting “the typical ‘happy buttock’ – high, rounded, dimpled – with its counterpart, the low-slung, drooping ‘sad buttock’).
While I understand the value of standardizing procedures and establishing guidelines for surgical practice, I stumbled upon the Cuenca-Guerra methodology. How and by whom were the determinants determined? This way: 1,320 photos of “naked women aged 20 to 35, seen from the back” were presented to a panel of six plastic surgeons who “indicated which buttocks they consider attractive and harmonious and the features on which this attractiveness depends.” Oh!
I thought it would be interesting to talk to Cuenca-Guerra about the concept of the visually ideal female figure. As something that can or should be surgically created (or, in the case of the senile buttock, recreated). As something that exists at all. I emailed using the address from a more recent magazine publication. There was no answer. Ramón Cuenca-Guerra’s buttocks are in worse shape than mine. He’s been dead for some time. I managed to contact his colleague, José Luis Daza-Flores. This is the third generation; just as Cuenca-Guerra studied under González-Ulloa, Daza-Flores studied under Cuenca-Guerra, broadening the lineage and making Daza-Flores, I believe, the “son of butt enlargement.”
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 buttock: presenting “anatomical features that make calves look attractive” and “flaws” that need to be addressed. In this case, plastic surgeons were again recruited to evaluate the images – 2,600 of them, representing a huge photographic centipede of women’s legs.
The newspaper took an unexpected turn. Referring to a tagged photo of a lower leg deemed attractive, the authors tried to show that its dimensions correspond to what in mathematics is called the divine proportion (or golden ratio) – 1.6 (I round) to 1. When we divide the line into two parts in such a way that the entire length divided by the longer part equals the long part divided by the shorter part, both ratios will be 1.6 to 1. I found an illustration of the divine proportion on a website called Math Is Funny (and convincing no one). The golden dividing line divides the length so that one piece is about two-thirds and the other is about one-third. The ancient Greeks divided the “ideal” face into parts of similar proportions. It was the first time I had seen divine proportion applied to a leg.
The article included the following sentences: “Seventeen women had slim, tube-shaped legs, and in the AP and LL projections the ratio was only 1:1.618.” While I admit I don’t get the details of the discussion, I believe this is a mathematically exact description of the cubes.