Efforts towards breast augmentation surgery go back over one hundred years. Over the course of the twentieth century, experimentation in a largely unregulated environment guided the field through several missteps - from the direct injection of paraffin wax to the implantation of plastic sponges and glass balls to the use of animal cartilage. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the breast implant in its current form had been conceived.
Venus Envy written by Elizabeth Haiken and published by the Johns Hopkins University press was the main source for the history described in the following pages.
