Curves in All the Right Places
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.
Anime And Manga
Yusuke Urameshi: Whoa Keiko, you seem to be busting out in all the right places.
Fan Fic
- Overused to the point of becoming first a cliché and then a meme in Harry Potter fanfic, concerning Hermione getting a visit from the puberty fairy over the summer.
Film
Eve Kendall: I'm a big girl.
Roger Thornhill: Yeah, and in all the right places, too.
- Played with in Osmosis Jones.
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
- From the Xanth series: "'But Nada weighs as much as you do!' Indeed, Nada weighed more, and in all the right places."
- In Stalking the Unicorn by Mike Resnick, takes this Up to Eleven, describing a Catgirl as having "curves in places other girls don't have places."
- A variant in Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions refers to Morgan le Fay's "body with more curves than a scenic highway."
Live Action TV
- Torchwood episode "Day One"
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."
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!
- "Honey Bun" from South Pacific:
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.