From the BBC:
It is 50 years since the first breast enlargement using silicone implants. Today it rates as the second-most popular form of cosmetic surgery worldwide, undergone by 1.5 million women in 2010.
It was spring 1962 when Timmie Jean Lindsey, a mother-of-six lay down on the operating table at Jefferson Davis hospital in Houston, Texas.
Over the next two hours, she went from a B to a C cup, in an operation that made history.
"I thought they came out just perfect… They felt soft and just like real breasts," says Lindsey now aged 80.
"I don't think I got the full results of them until I went out in public and men on the street would whistle at me."
Though the operation boosted her self-confidence - and she enjoyed the extra attention - she had never planned to have a breast augmentation.
Lindsey had been to hospital to get a tattoo removed from her breasts, and it was then that doctors asked if she would consider volunteering for this first-of-its-kind operation.
"I was more concerned about getting my ears pinned back... My ears stood out like Dumbo! And they said 'Oh we'll do that too.'" So a deal was struck.
The surgeons were two ambitious pioneers, Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin.
It was Gerow who had first come up with the plan for a new kind of breast implant.
"Frank Gerow squeezed a plastic blood bag and remarked how much it felt like a woman's breast," says Teresa Riordan, author of Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations that have Made Us Beautiful.
"And he had this 'Aha!' moment, where he first conceived of the silicone breast implant."
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Where are breast implants most popular?
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