Best Breast Forward (A-Cup)

Who's flat and happy? A sizable portion of the young Hollywood A-list is also an A-cup. Here's just a sampling of those born to be boyish and not about to change it (we think).


(Go ahead, guess which breasts go with which celebrity; scroll for hints*.)

A lot of fuss was recently kicked up when Keira Knightley (23) recently refused to have her mammaries digitally enhanced in publicity stills for her upcoming film "The Duchess."

But Knightley plays both sides. For the 2004 film promotion of "King Arthur" she was unaltered as the leather-clad Guinevere – but only in Great Britain. For the U.S. audience the studio supersized her natural A-cup chest to a boomy C-cup (the actual film must have been a twin disappointment.)

Knightley has previously spoken out in defense of photoshopping celebrities into an altered state by rationalizing that actresses are in the fiction business – and just as movies are all about fiction, so are posters and magazine pictures. "Films particularly deal with fantasy," she said.

The trend to be thin and bone in Hollywood dictates that most young starlets will have very little breast tissue – unless they undergo surgical augmentation. No amount of tape will make cleavage out of 32-AA. A tight corset and "bosom makeup" will hint at it, though.

There are very practical up-sides to being less well-endowed. Diane Keaton was able to appear attractively nude at 57 (albeit with a LOT of body makeup) in the 2003 "Something's Gotta Give." At the same age the lovely Scarlett Johansson's body is going to look like Kathy Bates in "About Schmidt." Only the slight (and childless) age gracefully.


Of course if one gets pregnant or eats, things get bigger: breast tissue is mostly fat. Ask Renee Zellweger.

But the truth is, flat-chested women are easier to dress than their DD sisters as any designer will confirm. There's a reason the catwalk models are rail thin adolescents. A very busty woman will end up looking heavy in anything that isn't skin-tight. Just try putting Pamela Anderson into a double- breasted jacket or high neckline!

There is probably never going to be a celebrity who will trade on a AA size bust the way Dolly Parton and Anderson have built a career on their twin peaks. But there is definitely room in Hollywood for big talent with small breasts.

Music from the show:

My Boobs Are Ok-Lene Alexandra

My Humps-Black Eyed Peas



*and about those breasts....

Christmas Cleavage

What festive cleavage are you wearing this holiday season? Next to finishing up the gift shopping, I'm sure the first thing on your mind is how to dress up your breasts. At the cocktail party I attended last weekend, I was accused of a Madame X look, a reference to John Singer Sargent's infamous 1884 portrait of the American-born Paris socialite, Judith Gautreau. Her arsenic white décolleté and scandalous slipped shoulder strap drove Sargent (and the painting) out of town.

Think times have changed? Last July, when Hillary Clinton displayed even a very modest amount of chest the blogosphere went wild.

Cleavage is simply the cleft created by the partial exposure of a woman's breasts in a low-cut neckline. Or, if you're a surgeon, it's the intermammary sulcus (fun people, aren't they?). So what gives it the power to shake the world, century after century? Context, context, context. That and men are irrational over it.

Breast cleavage has been a modern, clothed phenomenon; it didn't exist in the Garden of Eden. Any tight, well-structured bodice can lift the breasts upwards and inwards (that was the wonderful in Wonderbra – as opposed to Maidenform lift and separate promise).

Prior to the advent of implants, a large busted woman's breasts merged together under pressure; cleavage became a crevice. Think Bette Midler. A really well engineered bodice can cantilever the breasts in such a way that this is minimized. Think Isaac Mizrahi observations about Scarlett Johansson's Golden Globes dress.

But when it comes to breast implants, the width of the sulcus area (cleavage) is determined by the attachments of the skin to the peri-osteal tissue covering sternum (breast bone) and by the medial attachments of the pectoralis major muscle when implants are in the sub-muscular position.

If those natural attachments are lost a host of uncorrectable deformities distort the cleavage including synmastia, the "uniboob" deformity. This can result from over aggressive dissection towards the midline, particularly in a subglandular (over the muscle) placement. Very large implants, repeated over time can have similar results. Think Pamela Anderson.

Some women have very little fatty tissue overlying the sternum so there's nothing to soften the contour transition from breasts to sternum. This causes the space between the breasts to appear wide. Since the implants must be centered behind the nipples, it's very hard to camouflage, particularly with a subglandular placement. Think Victoria Beckham. (This is something she previously denied until court papers were released in 2005 proving she had undergone augmentation surgery; it's rumored she had revision surgery prior to touring this month. Looks like it to me.)

One woman has written a tome on doing it right. Elisabeth Squires, author of Boobs: A Guide to Your Girls, thinks even older women can attractively show off cleavage, as Helen Mirren (61) does at every awards show. But beware: "If a woman of a certain age squeezes her girls together, she'll get the wrinkled, crepelike look. That's not good." Mirren's plunging bodices carefully avoid that.

Now back to the festive part. Here we have our Christmas party Goofus and Gallant example. For the office holiday party, author Squires's advice is: "[i]f cleavage isn't in your job description, don't put it in." Sorry, Britney. But the adults-only cocktail party? You've got it, Paris. Shake their world: tasteful cleavage and heels are the way to go (but put on the other stocking, puh-leeze).

Be sure and tune in FM107.1 to hear an expanded exploration of celebratory cleavage with Colleen Kruse this Thursday at 10:00am CST, subbing in for Kevyn Burger.



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Designer Vaginas or Pimp My Vag

What's among the hottest new trends in cosmetic plastic surgery? I'll give you a hint. It becoming popularized under many names: "vaginal rejuvenation," "designer vaginoplasty," "revirgination" and "G-spot amplification" to name a few. In other words: surgery down there. Elective cosmetic genitoplasty being aggressively marketed to women on late-night TV and in magazines; even the NYTimes has written about it. Eponymous websites like labiadoctor.com actively target the young and nulliparous, as well as aging vaginas.

How do women talk themselves into it? The proffered promise is that genital surgery can enhance one's sexual pleasure, aesthetic beauty, and self-esteem.

Just who would offer up the most exquisitely sensitive part of her body to a surgeon with a scalpel? Apparently, growing numbers of enthusiastic women. It's estimated that an intrepid few of the 6,000 members of the American Society of Plastic Surgery (ASPS) have performed over 1,000 "vaginal rejuvenations" in 2005, 30% more than the previous year. That doesn't count in the pioneering gynecologists who do the bulk of these operations but haven't fessed up statistically.

What these surgical volunteers have in common is a shared misconception about normal genital anatomy and low self-esteem– coupled with the notion that a surgical fix is the answer.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), with 51,000 members, issued a two-page statement in the September 2007 issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology that declares "it is deceptive to give the impression that any of these procedures are accepted and routine surgical practices." Moreover, the doctors concluded that "the absence of data supporting the safety and efficacy of these procedures makes their recommendation untenable."

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) also weighed in on the topic with a May 2007 article calling cosmetic genital surgeries an "extreme and unproved intervention" that "could undermine the development of other ways to help women and girls to deal with concerns about their appearance."

Among the treatments doctors are offering only labiaplasty, which involves trimming and reshaping that part of the female external genitalia (the four folds of tissue of the vulva), is well documented in the scientific literature. Vaginal "rejuvenation" employs techniques similar to vaginal reconstruction after trauma (birth or tumor): the wall, muscle and connective tissue is supported and the introitus (opening) is tightened. (The non-surgical approach is to tone by strengthening the muscles with Kegel exercises. Yes! you could do it right now and no one would know.) Less commonly, the fat of the mons pubis is be reduced or enhanced, the clitoral hood removed, the hymen restored, or the G-spot plumped.

But the big seller is labiaplasty.

Who of the rich and famous are having it done? Well, what exactly would one be doing that might reveal the appearance of one's labia? Beyond Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan (nothing obvious there), the only rich and famous patients we can rightly suspect are the action porn stars. Larry Flint made a career for himself in the 1960s revealing the labia minora; doing so at one time changed the classification of a girlie mag from pin-up pulp to porn. In Australia, it’s still illegal for an adult publication to show the inner labia. Pamela Anderson's labia first famously disappeared when one of her 1990 rear-view poses was selected for reprint in a Playboy's Sexy 100. That area was airbrushed out, effectively 'defeminizing' her.

Nowadays, photoshop is used to create the illusion of uniformity. The carefully composed vulvas found in men’s magazines promote a smooth, sleek clam-shape as normalcy. Reality? Most adult women have inner labial lips that are at least partially exposed.

Historically, you have to go pretty far back to find that realism in the Western hemisphere: perhaps the Vénus impudique c. 24,000-22,000 BCE. Classical European sculpture and art right through Victorian times most often showcased the feminine ideal as a smooth, hairless surface with a hand firmly shielding it from view. The rule-buster was the mid-nineteenth century masterpiece by Gustave Courbet entitled L’Origine du Monde. (In contrast, less familiar erotic art has been produced in Japan, China, India and most Asian cultures for centuries.)

We modern women are equally mystified by and estranged from our own genitals. We don’t know how it’s supposed to look, do we? Whose aesthetics do we want anyway? The sad truth is, prospective patients come toting porn particulars. But is this a realistic consumer guide for the women, let alone the girls, to whom this surgery is being marketed?

No two vulvas are ever identical.

These trendy surgeons' websites offer for-profit before-and-after shots which are extremely misleading. Nearly all the surgeons are men. The aesthetics are entirely made-up and money is the driving force. There are some hilarious discussions on female-authored sites like Jezebel.com– check out this posting. That blog did some undercover comparison shopping interviews and found the pornographer more trustworthy than the surgeons; he alone seemed to hold a sincere appreciation for natural feminine variation. Much like Carl Linnaeus, the porn guy offered a taxonomy: "the bat," "the clam," the meat," and "the out-and-about." (In the 16th century, Sheik Umar ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi wrote The Perfumed Garden, an Arabian erotic manual cateloging 34 different types of vulvas!) Or one can explore down-there diversity by ordering the video Viva la Vulva. And for the artistically inclined, there is this lovely, best-seller coloring book for purchase.

What about the other claim? Does it really improve sex? The inner labia (minora) are richly endowed with nerve endings while the vagina itself has few. Tightening the vaginal vault shouldn’t help much and resecting a muscle compromises its strength. If the pelvic muscles are strong, orgasm is likely to be more intense and pleasurable– puts the ooh-la-la in lady-land. Cutting the labia could actually hurt (yee-ouch!) the chances of gaining better orgasms by interrupting the pertinent nerve fibers. And the post-surgical scarring alone, to say nothing of possible infection, could also seriously alter sensation for the worse. It's called dyspareunia, ladies, and that kind of pain isn't sexy fun. Most experts agree, great sex is in your head.

Does it turn men on? One article quoted them extensively:

"Unless there's some surgery that can change the taste of the vagina from salty and pungent to sugary — like a Twinkie, maybe? — then I probably don't care. Men are more concerned with 'rug burn' from infrequent shaving than the appearance of the vagina."

"Women constantly do things to their bodies I wouldn't do on a dare, so this latest craze in body alteration doesn't shock me or anything."

"I never thought about someone having unattractive labia. I'm usually so happy to get to see them in the first place that it never occurred to me they might be too big or too small."

So why do women do it? Another great undercover article by Lisa Carver, Surrender the Pink (borrowing from Carrie Fisher's book, you can guess at what it means), offers one conclusion:

"He shines a bright, hot light between your legs and offers you power over a part of yourself you don't understand. We could, by harnessing his "laseroscopy" machine, control our vagina. That's the snake oil he's offering. In the hour and a half I spent with him, he never mentioned men. It was power he was selling me. And for just a minute, I forgot I was a spy — I was ready to buy."

Want this look?
A labiaplasty operation performed in the Midwest runs around $4,900 in surgeon's fees. A vaginorrhaphy is in the neighborhood of $5,500-7,000. Labiaplasty is an outpatient procedure usually performed under local anesthesia. Very, very few women have clinical significant labia hypertrophy (labia stretched so long that it pulls into vagina with intercourse) which insurance would cover. Check with a gynecologist.

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Women & Tatts

It all comes down to Cher. Back in 1972 when she was 27 years old and newly separated from Sonny, she got her first tattoo:

"I thought it would be something different, a statement of freedom. Good girls didn't have tattoos then, no one was doing it...It was really the first step of an experiment to state making decisions on my own....I had made so few real decisions that I was bound to be bad at it. I was right."

Now all the A-list (and A-wannabe) celebrities are inking their bodies. The tattoo has become a female fashion accessory, rather than the rite of passage. It's no longer taboo, but still a little risque– different but accepted. It's almost difficult to name an actress who hasn't got a tatt. Everybody's doing it, from girl-next-door Jennifer Aniston to Bay-babe Pamela Anderson.

The subject matter of body art has undergone a revolution of sorts. The old stereotype of sailors and marines – and who doesn't know an aging WWII veteran with a blurry rendering on his bicep – are of a generation who never dreamed of finding their own name tattooed across the flesh of their stateside sweetheart. Today that's all changed. Women are elbowing out young men to get in the door of the tattoo parlor. In a recent survey, 22% of the UMass undergraduate women sports a tatt, twice the rate of the male students.

While "Mom" and the names of sexual partners still rank high in frequency and gang symbols are widespread amongst the prison-bound populace, the upsurge is in young women. Estimates are as high as 36% of all American women ages 21-32 now sport a tattoo. They seem to be indulging in tattooing as more of a journal of sorts. And the celebrity women are no exception. According to Angelina Jolie:

"Usually all my tattoos came at good times. A tattoo is something permanent when you've made a self-discovery, or something you've come to a conclusion about."

Okay, not counting the blue-tongued dragon she got when she was drunk and dropped trou in Australia a few years back (now covered by the black cross/dagger handle). Perhaps the most prominently tattooed actress today, Jolie has 13 tatts at last count and several older ones that were converted or removed. She has stated she’s just a “punk kid with tattoos” at heart, but dressed and strutting the red carpet, she is radiating more of a regal tribal look these days.

Some stars go so far as wearing it, literally, on their wrist. Not satisfied with a cement star in the sidewalk, Eva Longoria and Ashlee Simpson both sport small black outlined stars on their left wrists. Victoria Beckham has five stars on her lower back. Perhaps it’s part of the Michelin rating system?

And then there are those who want to commemorate their childhood. Nicole Richie sports a pair of ballerina slippers, as if her father’s composing Ballerina Girl for her wasn’t enough. But the little pair of angel wings on her back? You decide. Christina Ricci decided on having Aslan, the lion god of Narnia tattooed onto her left scapula to symbolize her emancipation from a hellish childhood – and seven more to go with it.

And then there are those fans that just go in for having the star himself as the tattoo: elaborate celebrity images are getting more and more popular. Reminds one a bit of those edible photographic sheet cakes.

This young female demographic is characterized by a certain exuberance of spirit that settles down as it approaches strapless wedding gowns and steady jobs. And tattoo removal. In the good old days, you died with your tattoos. Or you traded them in for horrific scars. Before the advent of lasers, a variety of treatments were tried: dermabrasion or skin sanding, X-ray treatments, chemical peel, liquid nitrogen, dry ice or CO2 'snow,' flesh-colored over-tattooing. The most common method? Surgical excision and skin grafting of the hole left behind. It wasn’t pretty.

The advent of medical laser technology has changed all that. Tattoos are created by placing drops of ink under the skin via a needle (hopefully). A Q-switched Nd: YAG laser is the one most often used to remove tattoos and other pigmented or discolored skin. The high-intensity light beam penetrates the dermis and is absorbed by the ink, vaporizing the pigment colors. It feels like rubber bands snapping against the skin. Hard. Over and over. The lymphatic system (the body’s natural filtering system) clears the dissolved particles of ink pigment. A tattoo that cost a few hundred dollars could require several thousand dollars and many laser sessions to remove.

Bright green, yellow and red inks are most difficult to remove. A new tattoo technology is available starting this fall called Freedom-2, a type of ink encapsulated in beads and designed to break up after one treatment with a special laser. It will be interesting to see if this 'removable' tattoo changes what and how often people adorn their bodies with images.

Tattoo removal clinic chains are making their mark or erasing it, so to speak: Dr. Tattoff, Tat2BeGone and Tattoo MD sprung into being on the West coast. Many states don't regulate tattooists or tattoo parlors, but do regulate medical lasers. These tattoo removal clinic chains are most often staffed by nurses. In other locales laser removal is supervised by physicians: plastic surgeons, dermatologists, or practically any physician with a laser payment to make.

Angelina Jolie has spent time in the doctor's procedure room: ex-husband Billy Bob's moniker has been lasered and the real estate tattooed over with the longitude and latitude of each of her four children. And Cher? At 61, she now thinks tattoos are "just plain stupid" and is in the process of getting them all removed.

In the final analysis, young women getting tattooed may be all about empowerment.

And power is really sexy.

What do you think? Click on the envelope icon and send us your thoughts.


(Okay, this last tattoo is made up.)


Want This Look? A professional tattoo can be had for under $100, and one that costs a few hundred dollars could require several thousand dollars and many laser sessions to remove. Dr. Tattoff charges $39 per square inch of tattoo for each treatment. Full removal takes an average of eight treatments, spaced at least a month apart, using different Q-switched lasers for different-colored inks.