I Tried Every Butt-Transforming Activity in Rio de Janeiro So You Don't Have To

I had a butt once. For three years, to be exact. During that time, I lifted weights competitively (squatting a couple hundred pounds was a normal Saturday morning activity). My butt was round, firm, and, though I didn’t know it then, perfect. In the decade-plus since, I lost it. It has returned to its genetically programmed state: undersized, a slight slope emerging apologetically from my thigh. I know it’s not hopeless, but I also know I’m not going to find it between the couch cushions (I have tried) of my Manhattan apartment. I can think of no better place to search than in Brazil — a land so legendary for its butts that the pairing has become a brand in itself. There are Brazilian butt workouts and Brazilian butt lifts (more on that later), Brazilian-cut bikinis and Brazilian waxes to wear with them.

And the Brazilian butt industrial complex keeps growing, as I learn soon upon landing in Rio de Janeiro. “You’ve never heard of the chip?” my friend Jacqueline* asks, as we speed in a taxi through the dizzying series of tunnels that connect Rio’s Ipanema and Centro neighborhoods. “The chip da beleza.” Jacqueline is a Rio de Janeiro native and a makeup artist. She starts pulling up images of female Brazilian stars on her phone. “Here’s what she looked like before. Normal, right?” (They are all gorgeous, long-limbed, and possessed of lush hair, but I agree — their bodies aren’t anomalies.) Then she pulls up more images. “And this is after the chip.” Sure enough, the same women are toned within an inch of their lives: taut abs, firm arms, and, yes, fantastic butts. “They get the chip planted inside,” she says, pointing to her upper arm. “And then the hormones make them want to work out, and they tone up like that,” she explains, snapping her fingers.

This sounds intriguing and disturbing. I make a note to investigate that mysterious little implant. But with just a week to try every butt-transforming activity under the Rio sun, time is as tight as those celebrities’ bottoms.

We’re at Rio Scenarium, which is, I’ve been told by exactly three Brazilians, the most popular dance destination in the city. I’m expecting to see Brazil’s brightest young things step-step-stepping their way to perfect rears. Instead, I’m disappointed to find that it’s swimming with tourists. Many of them are, indeed, samba-ing feverishly, but I’ve seen enough. What I’m looking for is certainly not behind this door.

I do as the locals do: run along the water every a.m. and p.m., attempt to work out on the jungle-gym-esque fitness stations that dot the sand every half-mile or so, and head to the shore each day in the cheekiest bikinis and most revealing one-pieces I’ve ever worn in my life. Each time I put one on, it takes me at least 20 minutes — standing in front of the mirror, changing, and standing in front of the mirror some more — before I can bring myself to leave my hotel room. Still, I feel equal parts naked and determined not to let fear swallow my sense of adventure. The suits I packed are from Adriana Degreas, a Brazilian designer whose New York City publicist handed them over with strict instructions to book a Brazilian bikini wax and “wear nothing — or just shorts” over them.

I quickly find that her preparatory instructions were spot-on, and that even in all my spray-tanned, hairless, Brazilian-bikini glory, I am still one of the most conservatively dressed women on Ipanema’s shore. My swell of pride at revealing a mere crescent of each butt cheek deflates. There are women of every size and age playing, swimming, and relaxing in bikinis that don’t cover their derrieres as much as frame them. The bulk of the fabric, if it can be called that, is devoted to covering the area between the butt cheeks and the pubic mound. Everything else is negotiable. A few women aren’t wearing bikinis at all: Instead, they’re wearing a special kind of black tape (yes, tape­ — and yes, ouch), applied in the shape of a thong and shrunken triangle bikini top, at one of the sol na lajes, patios situated away from the shore that are crammed with rows of chairs for lounging in the sun (the Portuguese phrase roughly translates to “sun on the slab”). And somehow, dimpled, smooth, or wrinkly, small, midsize, or large, they all look great.

Some swear that a teenier bikini can right one’s proportions, making the butt look rounder. So my friend Carol, another Rio native, takes me bikini shopping. She meets me at ViX, a popular Brazilian-owned swimwear store. About half of its offerings are regular string bikinis, and then there are the pieces that are little more than thongs, an inch and a half of ruffled material on either side of a ruched center. “This is called a levanta bum bum,” Carol explains, pointing to the elastic running up the back center of the bikini bottom. “It’s supposed to lift the butt.” It doesn’t look like it would do a dang thing for my butt other than create the illusion of a monster wedgie. But I’m tired of looking like a pilgrim on the beach. So I try it on. And I love it. Carol is one dressing room away, so I show her what I think is the bravest bikini bottom I’ve ever worn. Fully 75 percent of my rear is showing. “You need to pull that way up,” she says. I do as I’m told, and yank it up in a V shape over my hips. We’re up to 80 percent.

Now that I (kind of) know what I’m doing, I’ve graduated to bikini shopping on my own. I visit EMI Beachwear, a tiny store tucked away on the third floor of a building in Rio’s tony Leblon neighborhood. The owner, Anna Luiza, carefully considers every cut — a few centimeters, she tells me, can be all the difference between flattering a woman’s curves and cutting into them harshly. I leave with a lobster-printed bikini. The bottom shows a lot of cheek, but the sides are wide and generous. It’s the first one I’ve ever tried on that doesn’t hang laxly on my barely there butt or hug me so tightly that my hips appear to spill over the top. “In Brazil, we design swimsuits you can wear all day, not just for a few hours. You have to be able to live in it,” Luiza says.

A smartly cut bikini helps, but I can’t rely on fabric alone. In addition to my daily beach runs, I take up surfing, I sign up for samba lessons at Rio Samba Dancer (one of the few schools that offers classes in English), and I try Brazilian jiujitsu. All three recruit my gluteal muscles in ways I’d never imagined. And I swear, five days in, my butt is already starting to look better. Still, I’ve scheduled a personal training session with Chico Salgado, the man who sculpts Brazil’s most beautiful and famous bodies (and some Stateside — he’s trained Vin Diesel and his bodyguards). I’m in for 30 minutes of boxing, jumping rope, throwing (battle) ropes, leg lifting, and, yes, squatting. But not too much squatting — Salgado’s philosophy is to train the whole body, not just one asset. If I did this every day, I think my body would turn to steel.

But stiffness isn’t the goal; it’s fluidity. I also take a class with Justin Neto, a choreographer known for his booty-shaking, body-rolling moves and his work with Brazilian stars, like supermodel Gisele Bündchen and singer Anitta. I’m not missing many beats — a feat, considering I’m learning a new dance routine in Portuguese. At the end, he divides the class in half, has us perform the routine, and invites comments on each student’s performance. Everyone else gets what are clearly compliments: “Linda! Bela! Maravilhoso!” When it’s my turn, Neto calls on someone who can speak English for my benefit. “What did you think of her performance?” he asks. “You need to feel your body more,” she replies. Copy that.

The celebrity workout scene isn’t the only thing responsible for the incredibly shapely bodies Brazil is known for. Prior to holidays such as Carnival, the Ipanema office of Rio de Janeiro dermatologist Karla Assed attracts some women who are ready to get their butts lifted. “She has lots of celebrity clients,” her interpreter tells me, as an aside. “You know the cheerleaders that get in front of the car to dance in only bikinis and ultratight thongs? They get the lines inside the butt, and it [lifts], and it won’t move.” The treatment, called Silhouette InstaLift, uses absorbable sutures (the “lines”) studded with small cones of a polymer called PLGA (poly glycolide/L-lactide).

In the United States, it’s FDA-approved for use, but only in the midface region, to lift the cheeks. Assed uses the treatment to tighten and lift her clients’ rears. After inserting the sutures, she adjusts the butt to its desired height — the bidirectional cones on the sutures hold them in place. After about three months, the cones begin to dissolve, stimulating collagen and giving a lifting effect for up to 18 months.

I tell Assed I might be back in 10 or so years for a lift, and then head to the office of plastic surgeon Alexandre Charao to learn about the hard stuff. “Brazil has the second-highest number of plastic surgery treatments, after the United States,” Charao says. “But there are approximately 300 million people in the U.S., and 200 million here.” When it comes to butts, Brazil is tops — specifically, butt augmentation through implants and fat transfers (when fat from other parts of the body is injected into the butt). In 2016, the country had 8,360 butt-implant procedures and 77,770 fat transfers into the butt — more than any other country for which numbers are available. Charao estimates that up to 30 percent of his clients come in for buttock augmentations, either via implants or injected fat (the famed Brazilian butt lift). “Women in Brazil do expose the body much more than in America — even men want butt augmentation,” says Charao; 1 in 10 of his patients is male. “Sometimes they’re actors; sometimes they’re models. They just want better buttocks.”

But how did the Brazilian butt lift get such a bad rap? Since 2013, at least eight patients have died from the lift in South Florida. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) notes that the mortality rate could be as high as one death for every 3,000 procedures. Due to those alarming numbers, multiple organizations, including the ASPS, formed a task force to develop specific safety guidelines. I tell Charao I heard that overinjecting contributed to the Florida deaths. He opines that complications, some dire, can happen when fat is injected into muscle, not subcutaneous tissue. “Every plastic surgery comes with risks — but if you don’t make that mistake [with this procedure], the risk of complications goes down dramatically,” Charao says. He begs me to convey one thing from our hour-long discussion: Check for the doctor’s name on the ASPS or the American Board of Plastic Surgery website. It’s easy for someone with a medical degree to pose as having specialized training.

And what about that high-tech chip Brazilians can’t stop talking about? When I reach out to a doctor who had been rumored to implant it regularly, I get stonewalled by her publicist. “[The doctor] can’t talk about ‘chips da beleza’ during the interview,” the publicist writes. Someone else suggests that I talk to endocrinologist Amelio Godoy-Matos. He gives me the scoop: The chip da beleza has no official name. It was originally developed with a focus on contraception, but apparently, women began seeing changes in their bodies that they liked, and some started seeking the chip for purely aesthetic reasons. It’s been available in Brazil for a couple of years. Doctors who provide the chips get them custom-made at pharmacies before they implant them in patients’ upper arms. Each contains a combination of hormones, including testosterone. “Young women sometimes allege low libido in order to get it prescribed,” Godoy-Matos says. “No scientific society recognizes this chip — safety is an issue and there’s no approved dosage for women.” He says that though no high-quality long-term studies have been conducted on the chip da beleza, the side effects of testosterone can include unwanted hair growth, acne, baldness, and a deep voice. I hear this last one from a lot of people. It’s a tell of sorts. You see so many models and hear how deep their voices are — it’s shocking, one fashion publicist tells me.

On one of my final nights in Brazil, I sit down for several bottles of wine with a group of Jacqueline’s friends, who have kindly adopted me for the week. Tessa, the ringleader, finally puts into words what I’ve noticed all week. “In Rio, it’s summer year-round — you have to feel your body. I moved here from São Paulo. I had to learn to love my breasts, my belly, my butt, because I’m really seeing it every day.” Her words echo in my head as I prepare for my last day on the beach, in my most adventurous bikini, the ruffly thong from ViX. I apply copious amounts of sunscreen and Sol de Janeiro’s new Coco Cabana Cream (which smells like pipoca doce, the sweet popcorn sold on Rio’s beaches) and chase it with a gallon of the brand’s Copacabana Bronze Glow Oil. It disguises my skin imperfections in a gleamy blur. Instead of worrying, or worse, changing out of my bikini, I take a zillion selfies. Eighty percent of my butt is showing, and it looks great. I want to remember this. Outside, I sit on my beach towel, swim, break open a coconut, walk along the shore, and take turns balancing with friends on a slackline strung up nearby. And I don’t think about my body once.

A version of this article originally appeared in the December 2018/January 2019 issue of Allure. To get your copy, head to newsstands or subscribe now.

For more on Brazilian women:

• Why Brazil Is the Ultimate Beauty Destination
• Brazil’s A-Team Reveals Their Best Beauty Secrets
• The Top 11 Brazilian Beauties