Paying a High Price for Perfection

Sometime in the early 1980s, a friend told me a story about breast implants. It seems he was flying home to Los Angeles after a week of business in the East. He found himself on a night flight, with the plane half-empty. Next to him sat a young woman.

She was an off-duty stewardess going to see her boyfriend. Long hair, very pretty. They started to talk, then shared a couple of vodkas. It was the kind of moment that happens sometimes when you travel. The plane was dark and the two of them seemed to be sailing alone through the sky at 30,000 feet.

He was wondering if he should make a pass. She had a boyfriend, sure, but you never knew.

At just that moment she turned and asked if he would do her a great favor.

Name it, he said.

She took a long, deep breath. A few days before, it turned out, she’d had her breasts enlarged. It was a surprise for her boyfriend. She loved her new look but something still worried her. It was the matter of tactile feedback. She needed to know if they felt like the real thing.

So would he?

Yes, he would. And did. The result was positive.

Hearing the news, her eyes went teary. She now knew her boyfriend would be pleased.

My friend almost went teary himself. He realized he was witnessing true love, and forgot about the pass.

As I say, that was a story from the early ‘80s. I remember it was the first time I realized that everyday women--I mean women other than Carol Doda--were walking into doctors’ offices and casually ordering changes in their breasts.

Now, of course, we all know. The ‘80s brought us, among other things, to the age of plastic surgery, and California became its center. You can now charge a breast job on your Visa card. You can now choose your plastic surgeon by comparing their pictures in the ads of Los Angeles Magazine.

You might say that the development of the perfect breast ranks as California’s most visible gift to the medical world over the past decade. These days, photographs of reconstituted breasts adorn everything from billboards to windshield flyers. The surgery itself has been refined to the point where a good knife man can open the armpit, slip in the implant, and have the sutures closed inside of 15 minutes.

So it will be interesting to watch how the news of last week affects this cottage industry of ours. That news, as you may know, was not good. The Food and Drug Administration announced that certain components of a certain brand of implant degenerate inside the body. And the byproducts of that degeneration are carcinogenic.

The FDA was saying that California’s perfect breasts just might cause cancer. No one knows how many women are at risk and no one knows how severe the danger. In case you’re one of the 2 million women in the United States who have had breast implants, the brand names involved are Meme and Replicon. The FDA has promised an estimate of the threat later this week.

The cancer news alone would be bad enough, but it’s not all. There’s growing evidence that the silicone inside many implants seeps through the protective envelope and migrates throughout the body. And silicone on the loose is not innocuous.

However bad the news, no one seems to be backing off in the breast industry. Today, just like yesterday and the day before, you will see the ads running in the Los Angeles Times. No scars! they say.

It could be that the need for perfect breasts has now surpassed the weight of any evidence to the contrary. One plastic surgeon told an FDA official last week that every health scare about implants produces a rush of new customers who want to get theirs before a ban goes into effect.

In any case, when I heard the news last week about cancer and breast implants, I wondered about the girl on the airplane.

She was a pioneer in some ways. She got her implants in the early days of the ‘80s boom. What happened to her? Did her boyfriend love her new look? Was it just what he needed, and did he marry her, and did they settle down in a house near the beach and have two kids?

Who knows? Maybe her breasts still look perfect in the bathroom mirror and each morning she stares at them and feels grateful.

That’s what the ads want us to believe. Every day, in every way, it’s a belief that is becoming harder to accept. But for the sake of the girl on the airplane, let’s hope she got lucky. As I say, who knows?