Katie Price has had it done. So has Kerry Katona. With more women having breast reduction surgery, it's clear that bigger is not necessarily better, writes Anthea McTeirnan
IT SEEMS THAT the boom for the bust may be over. While the past decade has seen the triumph of a parade of silicone-enhanced über-women trading on pastiche - I give you Pamela Anderson, Victoria Beckham, various occupants of spreads in Nuts magazine and the queen of the cleavage herself, Jordan - it seems that surgically enhanced breasts may be going out of fashion.
Apologies to loyal readers who pored over the comprehensive results of last month's The Irish Times/Behaviour Attitudes Men Today poll to find that the pollsters had failed to pose a critical question. No matter. Heat magazine has come to the rescue by asking 2,500 men - "including celebs!" - that most pertinent of questions: do you prefer small natural breasts or large fake ones?
Once it had been pointed out to a number of respondents that said breasts were to appear on a lady and not on themselves, the following result was declared: 89 per cent said they preferred small and natural, while 11 per cent erred on the side of large and fake.
It's time to stop the self-mutilation, girls. And not just for yourselves - although it is the best reason - but because more than eight out of 10 guys say they prefer it.
And listening to those eight guys, it would appear, has been the aforementioned Jordan, aka Katie Price. Price has had two procedures this year to reduce the size of her trademark breasts from 32FF to 32DD. "My breasts have gone saggy after three children, so I wanted to perk them up and make them smaller," she said. They are still quite big.
Another to ditch the implants has been Rod Stewart's daughter Kimberley. "I was 18 when I got my breasts done and I think I got them at an age when I wasn't secure."
Even the pneumatic Pamela Anderson, whose breasts have enjoyed a huge career, had her famous implants removed, because she "just wanted her body to go back to its natural state." There's many a slip betwixt cup and lip, however, and Ms Anderson has now had new, bigger, implants because she "didn't feel like herself" without them.
Most notoriously, peddler of frozen foods and former Westlife wife Kerry Katona will tomorrow appear in the ironically-titled Kerry Katona: Whole Again on MTV One at 9pm. Ms Katona recently invited a few camermen to share in the joy of her breast reduction surgery. On successful completion thereof, Katona's current husband, Mark Croft, remarked charmingly: "It's like I've got another bird in bed with me."
At least the task of removing or downsizing implants is keeping the wolf from the door of those poor, underpaid, undervalued cosmetic surgeons. In the US they are reporting hard times. According to Allergan and Mentor, two US breast-implant companies, American women are cutting back on breast enhancements. The downturn was especially noticeable in the second quarter of 2008, according to plastic surgeon Dr Foad Nahai of Atlanta, who chairs the breast surgery committee of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.
Maybe it's time to reconstruct George Taylor's "hemline theory" of economics. In the 1920s, the US economist postulated that women's hemlines rise and fall in line with the state of the economy, arguing that in boom times, women's skirts are shorter. In the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties and the Excessive Eighties, hemlines rose. During the Great Depression, they fell. Reports from the recent London fashion week were mixed, but Stella McCartney's first outfit onto the catwalk was a long dress. You have been warned.
The fact that women might, one day, have their chests cut open and filled with bags of chemical gel probably never crossed George Taylor's mind, but if he was around today he would probably be talking about "deflation" - and not in the way to which we have become accustomed.
Not that we seem to be suffering from "deflation" in the breast department in Ireland yet. Last Wednesday, Dr Patrick Treacy of the Ailesbury Clinic was at its Cork branch where he said, "I've done three boob jobs already today". And he had two more on his books that day bringing his running total for the week so far up to 13.
Treacy specialises in what might be more accurately termed the "boob jab": injecting Macrolane, a temporary non-surgical breast augmentation treatment, into a woman's breasts. It costs €3,500.
"Business has gone up," he says. He thinks that "things that make people feel better are recession-proof. Boob jobs may be one of those things." With a waiting list of 200 eager to have the procedure, it seems he has a point.
But watch this space. When the US sneezes, we are prone to catch a chest cold. The decline of female mammary mutilation might be the silver lining in the global economic stormcloud and deflation could well be on its way as boom turns to bust.