By now, I don’t think anyone with a Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat account can say that they haven’t copped a “boob selfie” on their feed with a couple of decorously placed flowers/smileys/stars/hearts where the censors would otherwise be tut-tutting over errant nipples (image source: Google). Breast augmentation Instagram posts are almost ubiquitous lately. This has become so common place I think as to have inured us all to the fact that we are seeing a couple of very public breasts. How titillating.
Honestly, this doesn’t really bother me. So many young ladies are taking barely-there bikini selfies, that going one step further and gushing on public forums about their recent breast enlargement is, I guess, par for the course. But what is really interesting is the embrace (of many) of my colleagues (and of course, the always “out-there” cosmetic practitioners we have been speaking about recently) of social media as a format for advertising their skills in breast augmentation by the very simple means of “sharing” their patients’ posts.
If you jump onto the Instagram or Facebook feeds of any of the heavily advertised cosmetic breast services around the place (you know who they are) then one is confronted with a panoply of well enhanced busts, the photos of which have been happily submitted by the young ladies so eager to espouse the relative virtues of their surgeon.
Social media is the cheapest form of advertising a surgeon’s supposed skills in breast augmentation. There seems to be a plentiful supply of submissions by recently enhanced patients!
Now, it is well within the rights of both the individual, and the surgeon, to carry on this way (I suppose). But I really feel that a couple of things need to be pointed out about this particular trend:
1. I know that the “doctors” spruiking their wares consider these social media feeds to be a form of bragging, and I am sure that said doctors consider themselves very good at what they do, but I’m sorry to say that so many of the young ladies thrusting their breasts into the public arena have not had the best surgical outcomes. It amazes me constantly how blinkered some of the cosmetic practitioners out there can be as to the quality of their results. Sorry guys and girls, but bigger/higher profile is not always better. Not least when the implants have been put in totally the wrong position on the chest. Or the wrong implant has been chosen for the young lady in question.
2. The above notwithstanding, these social medial feeds do still comprise a “best of” selection for the doctors advertising thusly. Which means that whilst the breasts on that page are not that great, there must be a bunch which are even worse!
3. These social media pages are littered with gushing comments like: “ooooh, she looks great, I bet if I get the exact same implant I will also look just as good!” Now, I can’t even begin to get into how stupid these sorts of comments are in this brief post (I will get into it, at length in the future), but suffice to say, every chest and every breast is different.
4. These feeds normally have overlaid on the image the size/implant type in place. Which results in many an impressionable young lady then fronting up saying “well, I saw this girl with these implants and I liked the way it looked, so can I have the same?” Umm, no. Sorry. Just because one girl has what you think is a great outcome, popping along to your local cosmetic practitioner and saying “I want the same implants as her” won’t be a good idea. Ever. Because the less scrupulous practitioners may just do exactly what you ask, with less than ideal results.
Breast augmentation can be a fantastic procedure, capable of producing wonderful, natural results. But please, don’t treat instagram as a shopping catalogue. Take a more critical look at what you see on social media the next time you search “breast augmentation instagram”.