The mum who wants Britain's biggest boobs

Sarah Foster talks to two women who have had breast enlargements.

LOUISE Wilkinson seems like a normal enough young woman. The 24-year-old mother-of-two lives on a neat housing estate in Billingham, is happily settled with her partner Steve Thompson, 31, and is training to be a midwife. But Louise is not just any kind of girl - she's a self-confessed "boob girl".

Always convinced that her 34B breasts weren't big enough, it wasn't until after her first child Aimee, now four, was born that she did anything about it. Breastfeeding Aimee made the situation even worse - she found she could only fill a double A cup - and this plunged Louise into depression. "I couldn't look in the mirror and I couldn't talk to my boyfriend about it. I was never very big to begin with and I always wanted to be bigger but I had never thought about plastic surgery," she says.

The former Northfield School pupil went to Britain's largest cosmetic surgery provider, the Transform Medical Group, for her first operation, taking her to a C cup. But far from being satisfied with her average-sized breasts, she soon felt the need to go bigger.

Louise admits that once she had taken the plunge to have the augmentation, she became addicted to surgical self-enhancement. "I just like the look of breast implants and I suppose surgery is quite addictive. It gives me a buzz. I want them to look really fake and big," she says.

Having undergone two further breast enlargements, taking her to a buxom 34FF, and had a tummy tuck and liposuction for good measure, Louise is well on her way to achieving her dream - to own Britain's biggest boobs. To do this, she will have to fork out a further £5,000, on top of the £16,000 she has already spent on surgery, and she plans to travel to America for her next operation. In fact, Transform, which has carried out every procedure so far, has refused to boost Louise's breasts to the 34GG she craves on the grounds that they won't look natural.

If all this sounds suspiciously like the story of Britain's leading breast lady, the ubiquitous Jordan, it is no coincidence. Louise would love to follow in the glamour model's footsteps, and readily admits she would ditch her midwifery career tomorrow if it meant earning a fortune flaunting her oversized assets.

But do large breasts mean lasting happiness? And will Louise ever be happy with her body? She believes so.

"I've got an image in my head and I won't stop until I look like that. I do think that one day, I will make that picture come true," she says.

With a supportive partner and an understanding family, Louise is already on the path to fame, having landed a role in Sex on the Job, a discussion show about office liaisons to be screened on Sky One, on February 1. And her argument that big breasts can equal success is hard to dispute - she points out: "As Katie Price, Jordan was nobody. As Jordan, she's a household name."

But she admits that there is a downside to being so well-endowed.

"The only problem with having bigger boobs is when you go out, men think they have the right to touch them and feel them. It gets quite annoying. They lift my top up and everything, but it's something you deal with," she says. Louise also admits to having to order her bras on the Internet and struggling to buy bikinis.

She is keen to project a strong woman image, insisting her surgery is for herself and saying: "I've got my head screwed on and I know what I want and how to get it." But she also betrays an insecure side, admitting: "I'm a very self-conscious person and quite obsessive in nature."

Another woman who admits to breast enlargement surgery, model-turned-actress Helen Benoist, also cites self-consciousness about her body as a reason. The 24-year-old from Newcastle, who shot to fame as Peter Stringfellow's teenage girlfriend, says she didn't feel her 32B inch chest was curvy enough. "I think the reason I did it was because I wanted more confidence. I have a bit of a sticky-out bum and I thought it would make me a bit more balanced."

Like Louise, she claims to have had surgery entirely for herself. "At the end of the day, I did it because I wanted to do it. My opinion about boob jobs is, don't do it for anyone else, do it for yourself," she says.

While she no longer does glamour modelling, Helen has no regrets about her operation, which took her to a 32D five years ago. She also used Transform, and while she admits the procedure was painful, she is happy with its outcome. Unlike Louise, she wanted her breasts to look natural, and she says: "I think I'm very, very lucky because you can't tell I've had a boob job."

Although Jordan-esque breasts aren't for her, the former Northern Echo columnist doesn't condemn women who want them. "I think if they want to go for it, they should go for it. They're not doing any harm to other people," she says.

Her sentiments are not shared by Paul Baguley, an oncoplastic breast reconstruction surgeon who works privately and for the NHS on Teesside.

He would not perform further surgery on Louise, and doubts that his colleagues would either. "I think that cosmetic augmentation is designed to make women feel better about themselves, not to make them disproportionate. The sad thing is that she (Louise) will find a surgeon who will do it for her," he says.

Mr Baguley refuses to perform extreme augmentations on health grounds (large breasts commonly cause back problems) and because he wouldn't want women blatantly advertising "Baguley's boobs". And far from considering it a benign form of self-expression or a fast route to fame, he believes the desire for mammoth mammaries could hint at something much more sinister. "There's a higher incidence of suicide in women who have had breast augmentations than in the general population. Some of these ladies have body dysmorphic syndrome (an obsession with imagined physical flaws). This is not an operation that should be done to sort out all your problems," he warns.