In February 2021, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article about the brazilian butt lift (BBL) ou lifting In Brazil, this procedure is known as liposculpture, where the patient’s own fat is used to reshape body contours. Fat removed from the abdomen, for example, is injected into other areas, such as the hips and buttocks, adding new curves to the patient’s body.

According to data from the International Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS), presented in the report, this surgery has grown 77.6% in popularity worldwide since 2015. In 2019, 54,894 surgeries were performed, of which 18,370 (33%) were carried out in the United States, Brazil and Mexico. The article also points out the strong presence of figures like Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez and Nicki Minaj in the media, references when the subject is the ideal butt.

People tend to associate Brazilian women with wide hips and big butts, especially in the Global North. Images of popular festivals, such as Carnival, and of our beaches, filled with voluptuous bodies and tiny bikinis, illustrate the “Brazilian butt” costume. The body of the “mulatto” is idealized, as described by the anthropologist Álvaro Jarrín, who conducted an ethnographic investigation on plastic surgery in Brazil.

Brazil is a research and development center in the field of plastic surgery and trains hundreds of professionals in the most diverse specialties. This is due to a very specific access context, which acts as a two-way street between patients and professionals. The development of new techniques and interventions, for example, is directly associated with the possibility of practicing on the bodies of black and lower-class women.

Several plastic surgeries are offered by the Unified Health System (SUS), when understood as repair surgeries, that is, aimed at restoring or repairing any alteration, anomaly or dysfunction. The private sector, on the other hand, offers payment methods that facilitate access, such as scheduled surgery and the “lease-to-own payments,” in which the patient pays a certain amount per month until all costs are covered. In other words, aesthetic procedures in general, whether surgical or not, are not exclusive to the middle and upper classes. This is a unique situation, distinct from the rest of the world.

A closer look at various aesthetic interventions allows us to see the intertwining of plastic surgery with eugenic policies. The history of plastic surgery is marked by this relationship, even though we make a recurrent effort to erase its racial character. In this context, Sander Gilman’s work is representative. The author states that the history of plastic surgery is not only associated with a process of normalization or beautification: it is also marked by racial issues. Among the more than twenty procedures covered by him, it’s worth highlighting breast reduction surgeries, performed on a large scale in the late twentieth century in Brazil. Large breasts would be stereotypically associated with black women, in a way that middle-class families presented their daughters with the operation, moving them away from a racialized aesthetic. We can mention other surgeries that aim at the same objective, such as rhinoplasty, when it aims to correct the “negroide” nose—a racist definition adopted by eugenic physicians, and which is still in use today.

In anthropological and feminist literature, there are several procedures associated with an “ethnic” character, widely criticized for erasing identity marks, through a process of internalization of racism. One of these interventions is blepharoplasty, also known as eye westernization surgery. Philosopher Cressida Heyes takes up feminist critiques of surgery and asks: why are only non-white or ethnically marked bodies read as engaged in projects of bodily conformation? The author states that all body modification processes are implied by aesthetic norms, which have cuts of class, race, gender, age, capacity, etc. And white people actively participate in these tensions.

Let’s consider another procedure performed on the eyes, known as foxy eyes.The procedure is meant to make the outer corner of the eyes longer, which supposedly makes them more attractive. Influencer and actress Flávia Palavalli, who has more than 18 million followers on Instagram, had the procedure done in 2020. On social networks, many users wondered: why are Eastern Asian women are criticized for “westernizing” their look, for instance, while western women become empowered by seeking changes that make their eyes “sexy”? What is the pattern here?

Let’s recall the iconic opening scene of the 2016 Olympic Games, hosted in Brazil. Gisele Bündchen walks along a long catwalk to “Garota de Ipanema.” She is wearing her long blond hair down and a golden dress with a long front slit. The scene was televised around the world and is frequently mentioned again in Twitter trends.Gisele was the first Brazilian supermodel to make it to the international runways and, in the early 2000s, she was the highest paid model in the world. Gisele sells a standard of beauty that does not include the ideal Brazilian butt—indeed, a white standard.

Do all Brazilian women look the same? Of course not. Catwalks and foreign trade prefer and actively favour bodies that come close to a westernized model—the global north ideal. When looking for body changes associated with racial or ethnic marks, such as wide hips and big buttocks, larger breasts or more elongated eyes, white women seek exotic or sensual traits without becoming socially marked by new contours, like Melissa, interviewed for The Guardian. She sought the procedure in 2018 to “fill up her jeans” and attract the attention of “black and mestizo” men, who, according to the young woman, “like curvy women.”

Like hundreds of other categories, beauty is not one-sided. Within the same group, there are different standards of beauty, crossed by class, race, gender, age, ability, access, health. These patterns change according to the social, economic and political context in which we are inserted and over time. The development of surgical techniques and the training of professionals, as well as all scientific knowledge, does not take place in a vacuum. We are immersed in social relationships that effectively build our understandings of the world.

The idealization of Brazilian butts does not refer only to the construction of ideal and desired curves, sold through a surgical procedure whose growth has been expressive in recent years. It is necessary to pay attention to the broader picture: the backdrop to the development of technologies and how they are disseminated, the public who has access to these services, and, above all, the political and social aspects that underlie the possibility of the existence of certain bodily transformations.