Jessica Seigel complains about push-up bras. She claims when lingerie manufacturers stopped selling supportive bras, breasts ballooned, bras shrank, and

women turned to implants. They paid for 225,818 augmentations in 2002, according to American Society of Plastic Surgeons member reporting. Demand for breast implants and lifts rose 584 percent in the last decade — a higher increase than any other cosmetic surgery, ahead even of slimming procedures like liposuction (up 333 percent) and tummy tucks (up 392 percent).

Now we are so accustomed to stick-thin celebrities, models, beauty queens and our neighbors displaying orb-like breasts that it's difficult to believe (or remember) that this shape is rarely found in nature. But the drastic changes in the feminine silhouette in the last 100 years tell the story.

In the latter 19th century, women's most important undergarment was the corset, which cinched the waist but did little to support the breasts. Instead women had a low-hanging monobosom, as documented in histories like "Uplift: The Bra in America" by Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau.

According to their research, the first American patent for a prototypical bra was granted in 1863, but breasts got a life of their own only when bras became de rigueur for the fashionable in the 1930's. The new lift and separation evolved into the torpedo shape of the 1940's, which went nuclear with underwire in the 1950's, when the war's end freed metal for domestic use.

The struggle to buttress what is naturally low-lying has produced its own mythology, like the legend that in the 1940's Howard Hughes used airplane technology to build a better bra for Jane Russell in "The Outlaw." As Miss Russell, the queen of sweater girls, explained in her 1985 autobiography, the "ridiculous" contraption hurt so much that she wore it only a few minutes. Then she secretly slipped back into her old bra, tightened the shoulder straps, and returned to the set. The famed bra ended up in a Hollywood museum — a false witness to the push-up myth.

A British engineering professor, John Tyrer of Loughborough University, risked professional ridicule when he applied science to the brassiere. Using laser tools, he measured how the current minimalist underwire styles unnecessarily shift the full breast load onto the front chest wall, causing pain and discomfort, and even "wire rash," in larger women.

It took a rocket scientist to prove what women complain about in private, but don't act on, believing, or hoping, that a comfortable yet uplifting bra is just another shopping trip away.

First of all, I'm skeptical that it's the fault of the lingerie manufacturers that women are getting implants. I suspect it was changing mores encouraged women to buy increasingly revealing clothing, which leads many of them to get implants. The other thing is, if earlier underwear did "little to support the breasts", why does she want something "uplifting"?