I’ve heard of a husband giving his wife breast augmentation as a gift. I’ve even heard of a mother giving her teenage daughter the same gift when she graduated college, or high school, or turned 18. This mother gave her daughter a gift certificate were breast augmentations at the ripe young age of…seven.

One mother in the UK has gone a step further, giving her seven year old daughter a gift certificate for breast augmentation. It is meant to be used when the girl turns 16, and she can choose breast implants or other plastic surgery procedures.The mother, Sarah Burge, who has been criticized online, defended her decision by saying, “To me it’s no different from if I was a car manufacturer, reserving a car for my daughter when she is 18.”

This is honestly a really good point. Now, reserving any gift for a seven year old for 9-10 years later seems extreme, I don’t see much of a difference between a car and a breast augmentation.

A breast augmentation is actually a prosthesis which is used to enhance the shape, size, or feel of a woman’s breasts. Breast augmentations can be performed for many reasons, including medical reasons, reconstructive reasons, or purely aesthetic reasons. Breast augmentations can be handled via silicon, saline, or composite implants.

Breast augmentation surgery might seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, but the first one was performed well over a hundred years ago in 1895. If this seems like much longer ago than you would’ve thought, that’s because it’s much longer ago than almost anything thinks the first breast augmentation was. The procedure was performed by Vincenz Czerny in order to fix a deformity caused by the removal of a tumor in a patient.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the science was still very much out on what to make the implants out of. Ivory, glass balls, rubber ox cartilage, wool and polyester are just a few of the more quirky substances that were experimented with during the time. Saline implants were first mass produced in 1964, while Silicon implants first appeared in 1961.

As you can see, breast augmentation surgery has a long history in the medical world. The plastic surgery industry has been perfecting its techniques for well over a hundred years and have it down to a, pardon the pun, science.