Making the breast of it: Researchers ask people to stare at CGI boobs to help plastic surgeons

Plastic surgeons and researchers in Poland asked volunteers to stare at a range of digital boobs to help them figure out what people look for in their ‘ideal’ breast and to firm up the language of aesthetics.

“Terms such as ‘beauty’ or ‘aesthetics’ are subjective and thus poorly defined and understood,” plastic surgeon Piotr Pietruski said. 

“Due to this fact, both aesthetic and reconstructive breast surgery suffer from the lack of a standardized method of post-operative results analysis.”

In order to take more of the guesswork out of assessing a boob job, Pietruski and his colleagues in Poland asked 100 people to stare at naked (digitally-created) breasts for half an hour, all in the name of science.

The participants, 50 men and 50 women, were asked to simply look at the digital breasts of all types, ranging from small to large, saggy to perky, and in a variety of cup sizes, all on the same torso. The researchers tracked their eye movements as they stared at the CGI boobs from different angles. 

Any glance that lasted longer than 100 milliseconds was counted as intentional and was noted down to determine what are the key focal points people use when assessing breasts.  As it turns out, the participants spent 75 percent of their time looking at the nipple area and the ‘underboob’.

Their findings have been published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

However, the researchers admit they were only really determining areas of focus and not necessarily their subjective aesthetic preferences. 

They suggest more studies on larger, more diverse scales are needed to truly nail down a shared language of breast aesthetics to help speed up and improve the quality of plastic surgery consultation. 

Pietruski suggests the application of AI in the future to automatically evaluate boobs. 

“Personally, I believe that the most important potential application of eye-tracking technology could be the development of an artificial intelligence-based algorithm for the analysis of various body regions’ attractiveness,” Pietruski concluded.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!