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Tucked away on the scruffy outskirts of the city, the new Silimed factory is a colossus. Inside, scores of blue-suited artisans in surgical masks bend over workstations, each one lovingly sculpting artificial breasts. This is the place where bust enhancement is more than a matter of self-image or fantasy fulfillment, more even than a surgical procedure. Here it is an industry, and this is Brazil's silicone valley.

Rio's Silimed was already the world's third-largest prosthetics maker, turning out 130,000 implants a year, when it hurled up this new $4.5 million factory. Now output is expected to rise fourfold. But even this surge in supply does not account for the local rise in demand: How to explain Brazil's sudden rush to boost the bosom? This is a place where (how shall we put it acceptably?) the focal point of female sexual objectification has been the derriere. This is the home of the "dental floss" bikini bottom. The most popular swimwear shop is called Bum Bum. In assessing womanly beauty a shapely rear end has long been known as "the national preference."

Suddenly busts are booming. Not for nothing is native daughter Gisele Bundchen, the hypermodel with the generous bosom, the toast of Brazil. ("Free the Gisele two!" the fashion photographers shout as she flounces down the catwalks.) Bundchen swears hers are real. But a legion of admirers is willing to pay good money for that kind of cleavage. "Of course these are mine," one TV starlet quipped to reporters about her newly cantilevered profile. "I bought them with my own money."

Every fad has its philosophers, and scholars have filled libraries with their theories on Brazil's traditional sternward bias. Nationalists ennobled the backside as if it were nature's answer to everything North American, the sumptuous south trumping the top-heavy north. Feminists complained that the fixation is a conspiracy of men, who cannot look love in the face. It's going to be fun watching the scholars rewrite as the Brazilians retool.

Some new hypotheses have already emerged. Perhaps this is cultural imperialism -- too much Lara Croft at the cineplex. I'm not so sure. Brazilians are no strangers to the chesty pinup parameters of the north, which have always looked outre on this side of the equator. This country was born when Europeans mingled and married with Indians and Africans, a blend that gave its people their rainbow of hues and a New World breadth of beam. Now Silimed has given them counterweight. Margareth Figueiredo, Silimed's distributor, thinks of it as compensation. "I think Brazilian women always wanted bigger breasts," she says. "We just didn't know what to do about it."

No longer. Thanks to industrial polymers, DNA is no longer destiny. Neither is a scrawny budget. Once a new look could cost as much as an apartment. Now plastic surgeons operate on the installment plan. And if retail cosmetic surgery has democratized the vanity business, then globalization and immigration have intensified the traffic in taste and aesthetics. Suddenly whites have discovered the hips while Latinas become hip to the halter. Jennifer Lopez meets Pamela Anderson.

Fashionable Brazilians are in the vanguard of this worldwide movement. Trailing only Americans, Brazilians submitted to 370,000 plastic surgery operations last year, from quickie liposculpture to radical rhinoplasty. That's why Silimed also makes an array of parts for reconstructive surgery, including silicone chins and even prosthetic penises (laboratory-tested for 3,500 erections). There are pectoral implants for men who can't be bothered with the gym. And, yes, some Brazilians are still looking to plump up their blind side, especially the 40-and-over set, who have lost the buoyancy of youth.

But for now nothing beats breast enlargement. A decade ago, 9 of 10 Brazilian women who had breast operations were seeking to reduce them. Today just as many add as subtract. The size of the average implant has more than doubled over the past 10 years, to what the gossip mags call veritable "airbags."

Hardly a week goes by without news of some socialite's enhancement. "I thought this was just a fad," says Luiz Carlos Garcia, president of the Brazilian Association of Plastic Surgeons. "It looks like it's here to stay."

This makes surgical cosmetics a big business, but the country's 4,000 registered plastic surgeons are often regarded as artists. The most talented of them all, Ivo Pitanguy, was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, although Brazilians would be hard-pressed to remember anything he'd ever written. Pitanguy writes with a scalpel, and the human body is his fair blank page.

Brazilians are not alone in the operating room. The original gluteal implant is credited to a Mexican physician. In Argentina, wealthy patients book plastic surgery like they go to hairdressers. Over the top? Nonsense, says the storied Buenos Aires surgeon Jose Juri, aka "the Michelangelo of the nose." "Mankind suffers two great ills, aging and ugliness," Juri says. "Plastic surgery can treat them both."

Brazilians are famously religious and you might wonder if they'd think twice about tampering with heaven's creation. They are also an eminently practical people, who know how to hedge their bets. In their own Roman pact, they place their faith in God and their bodies in the hands of Pitanguy.

But for all the talk of a new aesthetic, Brazil hasn't entirely turned its back on tradition. A recent scandal restored the bum bum to center stage. It all started at Rio's stately Municipal Theater, where an experimental version of "Tristan und Isolde" drew a gale of boos. The eccentric director, Gerald Thomas, better known for his pique than for his physique, replied by mooning the audience. The police promptly booked him for indecent exposure.

Indecent exposure in Rio? In Brazil, it seems, showing your skin is too serious to be left to amateurs.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company