Breast enhancement - taking it too far?

For those readers old enough to remember the late night Channel 4 show Eurotrash, Lolo Ferrari was a familiar sight. No other female could match her extraordinary silhouette, for Lolo was the world’s most surgically enhanced woman in the bust department.

At her largest, Lolo’s assets measured a jaw-dropping 54G (as recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records, other claims variously range from 36T to 58F), and from the resulting incredulous gasps, Lolo forged herself a career, first in porn, then later in the music and entertainment business.

If you haven’t seen a photo of Lolo for a while, have a quick look on Google Images. Her pictures remain breathtaking, but for all the wrong reasons. As well as the extraordinary boob job (each breast reportedly held three litres of surgical serum), Lolo championed plastic surgery in that she also underwent a facelift, her lips were pumped full of collagen and even her eyes were reshaped. The number of surgeries to transform her body totalled more than thirty, and by the time of her tragically premature death in 2000, aged just 37, she was completely unrecognisable from her initial incarnation as Ève Valois, a pretty girl from Clermont-Ferrand, France. Incidentally, ‘les lolos’ is French slang for knockers.

In Lolo’s quest for inhuman size, several surgeons declined the opportunity to inflate her stretched-to-breaking-point skin, until eventually the last operation was performed by an aeronautical engineer more used to designing fuselage moulds. So what on earth would cause a woman to mutilate and so grotesquely transform her body in this way?

It turns out Lolo may well have suffered from Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a syndrome also linked to Uma Thurman, Shirley Manson, Judy Garland and Geri Halliwell. Body Dysmorphic Disorder (from the Greek ‘dysmorph’, meaning ‘misshapen’) is a mental disorder defined as a preoccupation with a perceived defect in one’s appearance. Most common fixations focus on the face, whereby a natural lack of symmetry or a perception that a feature is misshapen or out of proportion can cripple a person’s confidence.

When it comes to a woman’s concerns about her breast size and shape, plastic surgery is often seen as the only viable solution in today’s beauty-obsessed society. Glamour model Jordan’s insecurity about her breast size led to multiple operations to increase her chest to an eye-popping 36G. ‘I did it so I’d feel happier,’ Jordan aka Katie Price later admitted. ‘I love those pictures: they don’t look like me.’

Self-confessed BDD sufferer Alicia Douvall (real name Sarah Howes) is another pneumatic glamour model. Her craving to look like a Barbie doll set her back £1.5m over the course of 350 procedures on her face and chest (and allegedly having her toes shortened so they would ‘look good in sandals’). Alicia had the first of 16 breast augmentations as a teenager and in 2007 her surgical addiction went horribly wrong when one of her 30FF implants exploded on the operating table.

‘After the surgery my breast, or what was left of it, resembled a burst balloon with just rolls of loose tissue,’ Alicia told the press. ‘It felt like someone had caved my chest in with a pickaxe. When I saw what was left I wanted to vomit.’ Alicia was not alone – the late Anna Nicole Smith (born Vickie Lynn Hogan), was yet another glamour model. She took her cup size from A to FF, but allegedly suffered several ruptures and an exploded implant.[1]

‘Most people do have a dissatisfaction about appearance, but whether it’s BDD or not depends on the degree,’ says Susan Minall, a spokeswoman for OCD Action. ‘Everybody can relate to being dissatisfied with appearance to some degree, but it doesn’t make them ill. For a diagnosis of BDD to be made, the preoccupation must cause significant distress or interfere in one’s social or working life.’ All BDD sufferers are tormented by their condition, but the level of handicap can vary enormously from a generally distorted preoccupation with appearance, to a complete inability to deal with day-to-day life due to intensified feelings of physical inadequacy.

At the height of Alicia’s addiction, she’d walk into a surgery on a whim. ‘Every two weeks, I’ll go see another doctor,’ she said in 2009. ‘Often I’ll walk in, not even knowing what I want doing, and say something like, “What do you think might be wrong?” or “What do you think of my eyes?” I keep hoping I might wake up one day feeling happy with myself…’

‘BDD usually starts in adolescence – a time when people are generally more sensitive about appearance,’ says Minall. ‘You may manage it very well but you are always vulnerable and then something might happen to set it off again. These anxieties can also start after some sort of trauma.’

Alicia has revealed she endured an abusive childhood, which left her feeling ugly and desperate to change her appearance. Similarly, Lolo Ferrari suffered a deeply unhappy upbringing – her father was notably absent, and her mother openly taunted her, calling her ‘ugly’, ‘stupid’ and ‘revolting’, and beating her with a riding crop. ‘I was ashamed; I wanted to change my face, my body, to transform myself,’ said Lolo. ‘I wanted to die, really.’

Tragically, this victim of others’ gawping views of her physicality and her own altered self-perception, passed away after taking an overdose of antidepressants and tranquilisers. Some reports surfaced claiming that she had been suffocated by her own breasts, and her husband was for a time suspected of causing her death and spent just over a year in prison. He was eventually cleared; leaving the sad fact that Lolo’s chronic depression had ultimately resulted in her demise.

It remains to be seen how Alicia Douvall’s so-far dramatic life will play out – it was reported in Spring 2013 that she had vowed never to go under the knife again. She has spoken openly about her addiction to plastic surgery, saying, ‘It’s like being an alcoholic – I had to get to the lowest point before I could find my way out.’

Hauntingly, before her death Lolo Ferrari herself realized the sheer futility of her situation. ‘All these operations have been because I can’t stand life,’ she admitted. ‘But they haven’t changed anything.’

by Bryony Sutherland

[1] At the age of just 40 Anna Nicole Smith met a similar demise to that of Lolo Ferrari, having taken an overdose.