The Arts: LA life

My 36DD neighbours have not stopped talking about it all week. 'One minute big boobs are in. Next minute they're out. What's a girl supposed to do?' I heard one perfectly pert one say to another. 'Yeah. You're looking at $6,000 when you look at my chest,' the other replied.

After a few years of living in Los Angeles, you get to know which boobs are fake and which are real. Not that the issue holds importance for me personally, you understand. But since this is the town where bicycle pumps are more commonly used to inflate busts than bicycles, it becomes something of a game whenever bored in restaurants or shopping malls to play "spot the real deals".

Now there's a storm brewing in the proverbial which is threatening to burst the implant's buoyant bubble. Perfect 10 is a brand new adult men's magazine which was launched this month in LA. Its difference? It has a strict no-breast-implants policy: girls featured in its pages are apparently meticulously checked over for plastic surgery scars by the publisher himself. (Ooh, er, Mrs!)

Choosing Perfect 10 over something like Playboy is like "buying free- range chicken or pesticide-free produce", says the magazine's millionaire publisher, Norm Zadeh. Prompted by his favourite Playboy model getting a boob job, and an unaugmented friend being turned down by the same magazine, Zadeh decided to take a stand against implants. He calls it his philanthropic crusade.

"The bottom line is that it is an attack on women to keep showing images of surgically altered women and say 'That's the way you need to look in order for us to accept you'," says Zadeh, who has invested $1.8m in the project. "So I'm going to go out there and basically create a bit of resistance, and foster a bit more dialogue on the subject."

That he certainly has done. My 36DD neighbours have not stopped talking about it all week. "One minute big boobs are in. Next minute they're out. What's a girl supposed to do?" I overheard one perfectly pert one say to another. "Yeah. You're looking at $6,000 when you look at my chest," the other replied. "Are you telling me it's fashionable to be droopy now?"

I always knew my time would come.