The news about potentially dangerous breast implants was bad enough when it broke, but with each further report, the story just seems to get more and more depressing. Now not only are a great many women concerned about whether they are affected, they are apparently being exploited by the very clinics that supplied the implants.
Some cosmetic surgery centres, it is claimed, are charging women up to £50 simply to check their records and find out whether they might have been fitted with a pair of the potentially deadly implants: information that could be checked and passed on in a matter of seconds. But then is it any wonder these clinics are cashing in given the enormous sums they already charge their patients for the much-coveted boob job?
The pressure to have perfect boobs has never been more intense, and speaking as someone who has never wanted to be bigger (I'm an average size, since you were wondering!) I am personally shocked at the number of young women I meet who turn out to have had this type of cosmetic operation. Twenty-something women who were equally attractive before and after surgery seem to base their entire sense of self-worth on their breasts, and frequently bankrupt themselves in the quest for a perky pair. It's enough to make the rest of us wonder what we're missing out on and here lies the danger: the whole industry forces us to think again about parts of our body we may have never considered deficient or faulty.
It's also worth remembering that a lot of the women who opted to have this operation and who may have been affected by the faulty batch did so not through pure vanity, but while undergoing restorative surgery to correct their shape after breast cancer. So let's not allow anyone to fall into the inevitable lazy position of blaming women for what has happened. I know through bitter experience that in many people's minds we haven't moved on at all from the days when women killing themselves with lead-based makeup, and were mostly mocked for their misfortune.
[Image: GETTY]
