A British cosmetic surgeon has announced that he has developed a 'formula' for determining what he believes are the perfect breasts. He spent hours pouring over topless models to develop his theories. In his opinion, the celebrity with the most perfect breasts is Caprice, and the one with the worst breasts is Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice). According to the Daily Mail:Mr Mallucci said: "These findings allowed me to form a template around which to plan a breast augmentation, and set a standard of aesthetics.
Obviously personal interpretation and expression has to be accounted for, but this has allowed me to develop a template that I have been using successfully for some time. The key aesthetic elements are nipple position and the proportion between the upper and lower halves of the breast, he said.
The ideal is a 45 to 55 per cent proportion - that is the nipple sits not at the half-way mark down the breast, but at about 45 per cent from the top..."
Mr. Malluci is not the first plastic surgeon who has attempted to simplify beauty into a mathematical formula. Dr. Steve Hoefflin is a plastic surgeon who developed a very complex mathematical equation for facial beauty, which he described in his book "The Beautiful Face." In it, he uses the 'angles' and 'highlights' of a face to develop a numerical score of beauty. It's extremely complicated, but definitely interesting.
Here's my take: I don't like the idea of distilling everything down to mathematics. While it seems that everything nowadays can be explained by math (such as why music sounds melodic), I believe that beauty is not something that needs to be completely explained in this way. When performing plastic surgery, I do use some of these mathematical formulas to help determine what will give my patient the best result, but there is definitely an element of 'using my eye' to it as well. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. (And I'm sure that David Beckham likes his wife's breasts!)
Thanks for reading.
Michigan-based Plastic Surgeon
Anthony Youn, M.D.:
