Curves in All the Right Places

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A Stock Phrase for narrators describing an attractive female character, and for Fanfic writers trying to make a female character inexplicably more attractive than she is in canon. It probably describes an hourglass figure - that is to say, large breasts, round hips, and a small waist connecting the two - but exactly what it means is kind of vague and highly subjective, since readers' ideas of what "all the right places" are, and how much they should curve, will vary. While the figure it describes isn't going to go out of fashion any time soon, the phrase itself is rather tired and sliding into Discredited Trope territory.

See also Impossible Hourglass Figure.

Examples of Curves in All the Right Places include:

Anime and Manga

Yusuke Urameshi: Whoa Keiko, you seem to be busting out in all the right places.

Fan Works

Film

Eve Kendall: I'm a big girl.
Roger Thornhill: Yeah, and in all the right places, too.

Osmosis: [looking at a centerfold in DNA Monthly] Nice genes. You got the chromosomes in all the right places.

  • Murder on Vine

Gina Babs: She was a swell girl, and swollen in all the right places.

  • In Go West, Chico Marx asked Harpo what he had spent $60 on, and Harpo made an "hourglass" figure with his hands. Chico replied "Oh, you bought a snake." (The gag also appears in A Day at the Races, in which Harpo's attempts to tell Chico about The Vamp who plans to seduce and frame Groucho are interpreted as, "A snake! A big, big snake!" After Harpo's gestures and whistles get more and more exaggerated, "That's-a no snake.")

Literature

Live-Action TV

Captain Jack Harkness: Now, first of all, she's no little girl. From where I'm standing, all the right curves in all the right places.

  • One episode of F Troop had Corporal Agarn come up with an advertising slogan for a corset: something about "it'll give you an hourglass figure, with all your sand in the right places."
  • In the episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" of Star Trek: The Original Series, Koloth says "We do not equip our ships with, how shall I say it, non-essentials." It's hard to see because of some spectacularly bad (or deliberate) editing, but he makes an hourglass gesture with his hands as he does.

Music

  • Mika's "Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)":

A watering hole
With the girls around
And curves in all the right places

Theatre

  • Lola's song "A Little Brains—A Little Talent" in Damn Yankees:

You gotta stack those decks with a couple-a extra aces,
And this queen has her aces
In all the right places!

Where she's narrow, she's narrow as an arrow
And she's broad where a broad should be broad!

Web Original

  • Survival of the Fittest characters Charlene Norris and Kallie Majors, from versions four and three respectively, are described this way.