- Breasts are large sweat glands that have become modified to produce milk instead of sweat
- Even a newborn baby has some basic breast tissue, which started to develop when it was a 6-week-old fetus
- Newborn babies can have noticeable breasts. This is perfectly normal, and occurs because the mother’s oestrogen hormone has stimulated the baby’s breast tissue. The breast swelling gradually disappears over a few weeks
- The first bra was invented by New York socialite Mary Jacobs in 1913. She used two hankies and some ribbon, and then patented the idea
- Tesco, the UK supermarket, couldn’t sell big, fleshy melons. Research by a psychologist suggested that women were subconsciously comparing them with their breasts. So Tesco’s growers have been asked for melons no more than 1lb 3oz in weight, which equates to a C cup (Daily Telegraph 1999)
- In the 1970s men working in a factory making the contraceptive pill found their breasts were enlarging. Oestrogen was the culprit
- The number of breast enlargement operations has declined in recent years. In the UK, 8619 were done in 2014, down 23% compared with 2013. In the USA, 286,694 breast augmentation operations were performed in 2014, a fall of 8.5% on the previous year.
- Breast enlargement is more common than rhinoplasty (nose job). In the UK and USA, 3690 and 145,909 rhinoplasties were carried out, respectively, in 2014.
Written by: Dr Margaret Stearn
Edited by: Dr Margaret Stearn
Last updated: Monday, August 24th 2015
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