My instant boob job from 36A to 36DD - and the effect it had on men (and women)
Last updated at 00:59am on 30th November 2007
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Clover Stroud: Goes double D for the day
Worse – or was it better? – was to come. In Sainsbury's not one but two men offered to let me go ahead of them in the queue.
Another wanted to know if I needed help packing my groceries away. Another still wanted to open my car door for me in the car park.
In my local delicatessen, Gluttons, the man behind the counter smiled and nodded like an eager puppy as I bought such mundanities as olive oil and courgettes.
But it was the (male) librarian at my local library who really seemed to have lost his marbles.
Only a few days previously, he had processed my son's books in the nursery section, and he had seemed like a perfectly normal, capable, soul.
Now, though, he was a man on the edge.
He stuttered when I asked him to show me how to use the new IT system. He flushed beetroot as I sat down.
As he pointed to the screen, I noticed that his hand shook. He seemed incapable of a simple sentence.
Eventually, muttering something about going to find his assistant, he fled completely, and sent a (female) colleague back in his place.
Not that the women of Oxford were behaving normally either.
One looked decidedly cross and uncomfortable to be asked directions to the post office.
When I left a bar that evening, three glamorous types threw me withering looks.
But what had inspired this frankly odd behaviour from complete strangers? Quite simply, it was my pair of perfectly perky 36DD breasts.
What they didn't know of course was that they were in fact made of silicone and had been 'added' to my chest the previous day.
For most of my life, I'd never given a lot of thought to the contents of my bra. I suppose I am on the small side of normal – I am a 36A, but might go up to a 36B depending on the manufacturer.
While I've never been one of those completely flat-chested girls who can run around all day wearing a vest and no bra, my breasts are not my defining feature.
But would I want them to be? Well, like it or not, this past week they were - in the name of journalistic investigation.
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Clover before (left) with her 36A breasts and getting fake ones fitted by Paul Boyce
Breasts are in the news again – when are they not? – because Trinny and Susannah have been going on about them in their show Undress The Nation.
Like everyone else, I was intrigued to see in the papers a few days ago pictures of skinny Trinny wearing a pair of specially made 32D prosthetic breasts to see what all the fuss is about - and how people would react to her as a top-heavy woman.
I decided to try the same experiment. The man who created my awesome breasts is Paul Boyce, a prosthetic and TV special effects expert.
He took a cast of my real breasts using a dental aginate and plaster bandages. When this had dried, he then sculpted a fibreglass resin mould over the top, and injected prosthetic silicone between the mould and the cast.
The result was startling: a pair of perfect 36DD silicone breasts that fitted from my collarbone to just above my stomach, and which had to be reapplied every day.
They were absolutely lifelike and they moved naturally with me. Once fitted, he painted them using eight different colours combined exactly to match my skin tone.
They felt similar to wearing a tight sports bra. In fact, I could almost forget I was wearing them. Or at least I could until I looked in a mirror.
As soon as I got dressed, I was transfixed. My dress – which I'd always clinched in with a belt, so voluminous was the top – was properly filled out for the first time, and the belt suddenly made me look like Dolly Parton.
Suddenly, I knew what 'figure hugging' meant.
The outfit called for heels in a way that it never had before. I put some on, and, well, strutted around the bedroom, admiring my new breasts and new profile.
I thought I looked immediately more feminine. And taller. And sexier. Yes, it was an odd sensation – I felt as if I had grown another arm – but I felt happier too, as illogical as it sounds.
I have had those sensations once before about seven years ago, when I was 24, and I had a momentary, but startling, insight into what it might be like to be born with very, very large breasts, and to find yourself unable to have a conversation with a man without his eyes drifting downwards.
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Man-magnet: All eyes on Clover with her new breasts
I was in hospital, having given birth to my son hours before and one of my first visitors after the birth was my best male friend. He's someone I've known all my life, and I am as close to him as my closest girlfriend.
We've always had a platonic relationship, but there's little we've not shared. He's even seen me naked - as a teenager I once stripped off and then jumped into a river in front of him.
This time he'd come to admire my new baby boy, but as I regaled him with details of the birth, I realised he had that blank, stunned, slightly stupid expression which indicated he hadn't heard anything I'd said to him.
Not only that, but he could not maintain eye contact with me, and his mouth was open.
He wasn't having a conversation with me, but with my breasts.
Overnight, as my milk had come in, I had developed 36G breasts the size of, well, vast melons.
As I chatted away, I realised that he was getting misty eyed, but it wasn't over the fact that I had just asked him to be a godfather, but rather at the sight of my new, fabulous, full breasts straining against my shirt.
I was surprised rather than offended by the fact that this dramatic development of my new assets had totally changed me in his eyes.
It certainly felt odd that my status as a friend might be radically redefined by the size of my breasts, and the episode left me with an enduring memory of the power of large breasts, and a fascination with how life would have been, had I held onto mine post-breastfeeding.
Would it have changed the way men treated me? The way I viewed myself?
This week, I found out by inflicting my new silicone breasts on the good people of Oxford, where I live.
The postman was first, and I was bemused that he seemed much cheerier than normal.
Then came the couple I asked for directions in the street. She was noticeably irritated. Odd enough.
But at least she managed to keep looking in my face as she talked to me. Her husband was downright rude. He simply looked at my cleavage.
And looked. And looked. It was brazen, and deeply embarrassing.
I felt like asking him if I could check out his chest in return – genuinely surprised that he could feel so comfortable openly gawping my breasts in front of his wife.
I wandered off, dismissing him as some saddo with an overt breast fixation and probably a complex Freudian relationship with his mother.
But what I didn't realise was that my experiences with my new chest were about to prove that he was, in fact, just a very normal man.
It's such a cliché, but with a few hours I had realised that large breasts really do work as a man magnet at at least a hundred yards.
Men walking past clocked me, then checked me up and down in a way that I found unsettling – so unused was I to the experience.
They seemed to have a primal urge to stare at my breasts and nothing – not wives, girlfriends or even modern etiquette – seemed to deter them.
Drivers did a double take, one swerving violently – comedy strip-style – to avoid a passing cyclist. Men made eye contact frequently, but having detected a flicker of attention from me they could only stare at my breasts.
At first I was bemused, even flattered in a strange way. The feeling of power my new breasts gave me was a novelty.
Throughout the first day, doors opened to me that I hadn't even realised existed, let alone that they were closed to me. The age of chivalry – long dead, I'd always thought – was suddenly resurrected.
I gleefully recounted my experiences in the supermarket to a male friend, who simply snorted.
"Those men only let you go in front of them in the queue so they could ogle your cleavage," he said. Oh. Suddenly, it didn't sound so empowering.
Now that I was in possession of a 'proper' pair, my male friends were only too happy to enlighten me as to why they find large breasts so fascinating.
Universally, it seems, they associate them with sex and fun.
One told me: "I know it's not right, but when a girl has large breasts, I naturally assume that she must be more interested in sex than someone with a flat chest."
Luckily for men, there are clearly a lot more large-breasted women out there than ever before. In the past 50 years – largely due to an increasingly fatty diet, and the widespread use of the contraceptive pill – average breast sizes have increased.
The much-quoted British average is now a 36C – but large bra specialists Bravissimo estimate that this figure should really be closer to a 34DD or even a 34E. Marks and Spencer is currently trialling a J cup.
Well, I can't say I would rush for that size of silicone on my chest. At the gym, I suddenly understood why my larger-chested friends moan about their bust size.
I didn't feel as if I was as efficient at doing weights as I usually am.
Quite simply, they get in the way. I couldn't help but admire my newly curvaceous silhouette in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, but running on the treadmill was a different matter.
All the anti-bounce sports bras in the world aren't going to stop this sort of unwanted movement. I half expected to walk out of there with two black eyes.
Suddenly, I had sympathy with friends I have long envied. I recalled the sight of one of them hugging her hands over her ample breasts as she ran up the hockey pitch at school, trying but failing to score a goal at the same time.
"My large breasts made my life a misery," she tells me now.
"You envied me, but I would have done anything to have had a normal breast size. I wasn't confident enough for the attention from men, then, and they were a nightmare for exercise."
For the first time, I saw why large breasts could also be painful, irritating and humiliating.
Perhaps the biggest test of how I felt about my 'new' breasts came on a night out with some girlfriends.
The male bar staff snapped to attention when I walked into the upmarket cocktail bar, and didn't seem in the least irritated that it took me some time to choose a drink.
Funny that. The stares followed me all night. One man was downright objectionable – so much so that I actually asked him what he was staring at. The reply stunned me.
"I'm a plastic surgeon," he replied. "You've obviously had implants but whoever did it, did a fantastic job. Can I ask the name of the surgeon?"
But being out at night in a safe, upmarket environment is one thing. I would not have dared to walk into a pub full of leery drunken men with breasts this large.
When I left the bar alone, I was aware that three women outside were looking daggers at me. I realised that my breasts are as threatening to some women as they are titillating to men.
Did they, too, think that this cleavage was somehow a indication that I was looking for sex?
Shivering as I waited for a taxi in the rain, a man passed me.
“Lovely boobs,” he murmured almost to himself. How dare he? I hadn't invited, or wanted his attention.
Friendly smiles at the supermarket checkout might be fun, and quite flattering, and it might get you home sooner with your groceries, but this was something else.
It verged on menacing. And it was completely out of my control.
I realised that a whole lifetime of being checked out, and commented on, like some prize heifer, would drive me quite mad.
I stomped home, angry and confused. I found myself longing to rip off the silicone.
With smaller breasts, my body is my own – rather than a piece of public property, to be admired - or simply ogled - in much the same way as a sculpture in a park.
OK, so large breasts are fun and sexy, but there are days when I don't want my body to be viewed as a comedy item.
I don't necessarily want to be whistled at, or stared at on the school run.
Sometimes I want to be anonymous – and that is practically impossible once you venture into DD-cup territory.
And yet, I liked them too. By the end of the week, I had grown quite attached to my new breasts.
It is undeniable that they did make me feel more feminine and a whole lot sexier.
But they were fantasy breasts, and accepting that made them easier to take off for good. Because they were made of silicone, they were pert and lifted, and perfect.
Most breasts – like so much of life – are imperfect. They sag and droop.
I will never have large breasts again, though, and that makes me sad.
They are sitting on my dresser now, a silicone reminder of some fleeting memories of being a size DD.
I won't forget them. Nor, obviously, will the men of Oxford.
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