RadioScope: World Stories: Brazilian Beauty, BBC World Service Radio, Friday, June 2nd, 8.05pm
You don't expect the Girl from Ipanema to talk to you from the BBC World Service. There she was, though, addressing us on the latest programme in the World Stories series, Brazilian Beauty.
As the original Girl from Ipanema, she attracts a great deal of interest but she laments that many of her visitors still want to meet the 18-year-old girl who inspired the song as she strolled past the Veloso bar cafe in Rio de Janeiro on the way to the beach in the mid-1960s.
The programme was not actually about the Girl from Ipanema but rather about the Brazilian obsession with female beauty, particularly in the bottoms and breasts department.
In Rio de Janeiro the pressure is especially intense. In a setting in which strolling to the beach with very little on is more or less the normal thing to do, the appearance of the body becomes all-important.
As reporter Ilana Rehavia explained, "the combination of wearing next to nothing and feeling inadequate can be very crippling".
The result is that Brazilian women spend enormous amounts of time at the gym and are increasingly turning to plastic surgery to make their bodies conform to the images to which they aspire. Every year, more than 600,000 plastic surgeries are carried out in Brazil.
Rehavia, her sister and her mother have all had plastic surgery to have their breasts reduced. Her mother has also had a facelift and some surgery around her eyes.
For some Brazilian women, their emotions seem to get channelled into the question of being beautiful or ugly. One young girl explaining how her feelings change during the day describes herself not as feeling down or feeling happy, but as feeling beautiful or feeling ugly.
Girls learn all this from their mothers. Babies leave the maternity ward with their ears pierced. Mothers build a considerable proportion of their lives around diet, gym and surgery and, says Rehavia, they look stunning. Probably a bit like the "yummy mummies" we hear about in Dublin.
Small wonder that teenagers are having plastic surgery, with all this competition from mum. Or that, as one magazine editor explained, girls just five kilos overweight might not leave the house for six months.
One doctor complained about what he called "the growing level of eroticising of younger and younger children". Girls as young as seven are encouraged to do erotic dances such as the samba and quickly begin to worry about the appearance of their bodies.
Apparently, the obsession among Brazilian beauties used to be with having a perfect bottom but now they must have perfect breasts as well, hence the boom in plastic surgery. Compared with bottoms and breasts, "the face is immaterial", the reporter told us.
Interestingly, the preoccupation with beauty is not confined to the big cities but can now even be found in the rainforest. Cosmetic saleswomen travel from village to village in the rainforest selling their wares, for which they find a ready market.
Beauty and fitness are equated in Rio and elsewhere in Brazil. The women in Rio are regarded (by themselves) as the fittest in the world. Still it all seems to exercise a tyranny over them, especially in relation to how they see themselves.
Rehavia summed up her own experience of nearly 20 years of striving for perfection in these words: "20 kilos more, 20 kilos less, bad skin, bad self-esteem".
The trick, she says, is to stay on the right side of the line between wanting to be healthy and beautiful and becoming obsessed.
I couldn't help feeling, though, that she herself would not be averse to going under the knife for the odd nip and tuck in the future.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor.
