Fake Boobs

These could well be fake.

"The doctors say it dates back to a film where I had these huge prosthetic breasts because my character was breast-feeding. The weight of them, and of the baby, did my back in."

— Anna Friel

Due to the Buxom Beauty Standard, some women are concerned with their cup sizes, so they try to increase them with padding or surgery. Usually used as a way to demonstrate A-Cup Angst, and as a method for Breast Expansion. Very commonly Played for Laughs.

For someone who's a Cross Dresser or Disguised in Drag, simply using two appropriately-sized balls or stuffing a bra will suffice, but store-bought fake breasts are also available.

Sometimes when two girls disguise themselves as a tall woman in a trench coat, the folded-up legs of the top girl will be the bust.

See also Pillow Pregnancy. Compare Compensating for Something and Fake Muscles and contrast Hidden Buxom. Often involved in a Boob-Based Gag.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• During the Beach Episode of Bleach, Rangiku Matsumoto gets suspicious when Nanao Ise shows up in her swimsuit bustier than usual. She grabs Nanao and pulls out her padding.
• Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!: Former wro wrestler Veronica Lin has implants, presumably because not every female athlete is as fortunate as Misora to be able to keep her endowment in spite of her exercise regimen. Maria Riviera mocks her for this before their match, but Lin returns the favor with a jab about Maria's butt being bigger than her boobs.
• Yun-Yun from Canaan sometimes stuffs Dumplings in her shirt.
• In Chainsaw Man, Power tempts Denji into helping her by letting him cop a feel. When the moment finally comes she reveals that she's actually wearing breast pads and that she's actually fairly flat, driving him into an existential crisis.
• Kamome in Cyber Team in Akihabara wants to have bigger breasts for Gold Digger reasons and consequently stuffs her bra to appear bustier than she really is.
• Great Teacher Onizuka: in the final chapter, the newest teacher is discovered (through actual groping by a female student) that she wears a padded bra.
• A comedic one-scene gag appears in HeartCatch Pretty Cure!, episode one, when the Fairy Mascots hide inside Tsubomi's shirt in order to hide from the Desertrian General Sasorina, who is not amused by how "busty" Tsubomi appears to be. Admittedly it does help them escape detection that one time.
• The title character of High School Ninja Girl, Otonashi-san is shown early on to use padding out of A-Cup Angst.
• Episode 9 of Kamen no Maid Guy revolved around the main character going undercover in a rival cake shop that's only selling point is all the waitresses have at least D cup breasts with very low neckline maid uniforms. The biggest bust belonged the shop's unnamed manager, whose breasts could be measured in the meters; until it's revealed that her breasts were just giant falsies and even all her waitress' breasts were just silicone.
• Kore wa Koi no Hanashi has Satomi's impressive bust be fake. Justified, she is a transgender woman and required the hormones and surgery to get them.
• The Substitute Queen of Kamabakka Kingdom in the One Piece anime filler wear those under his dress.
• Overlord (2012): Shalltear was written as an Elegant Gothic Lolita with A-Cup Angst, and so uses fake boobs to look more like a sex-god vampire. Used to completely ruin her Establishing Character Moment when Aura notes she used a gate spell rather than walking to report to Ainz in order to avoid disturbing her pads.
• James/Kojirou of Team Rocket, in one of Pokémon: The Original Series's most infamous episodes, wore a pair of inflatable breasts (and, thank gods, a towel) to a beauty contest. The audience was very impressed. The censors, less so.
• In Pokémon Adventures, Green infamously once hid two Poké Balls in her dress. Then when she was immobilized, she then taunted Sabrina into ripping her top off which released the Pokémon inside.
• Played with in Princess Jellyfish: when Wholesome Crossdresser Kuranosuke passes out in the lobby of their apartment building, Mayaya attempts to help by applying Vicks Vapo-Rub to "her" chest, and in the process discovers that Kuranosuke's breasts are fake. Mayaya and the other members of the Sisterhood present completely miss the obvious and instead accuse Kuranosuke of padding "her" bra to hide her A-Cup Angst.
• In the first episode of Samurai Champloo, Fuu runs with bombs under the chest area of her kimono, giving an appearance of bouncing breasts.
• Whilst she's not completely lacking, Karina Lyle of Tiger & Bunny wears a padded costume as the superheroine Blue Rose. Her sponsors are marketing her for her sex appeal (much to her annoyance), and are rather insistent on the importance of the Most Common Superpower.

Comic Books

• Empowered: Ninjette once used them to impersonate Empowered using kyonyujutsu (fake boobery magic).
• A MAD Magazine section about the uses of various animals suggests using a pair of twin turtles as falsies for women.
• In New Avengers Volume 1 #14, Hydra performs surgery on Jessica Drew to give her back her powers. Two breast implants can be seen on the surgery tray, and some pages later, Jessica declares "every part of me was better than it was before. Every part."
• In Le Petit Spirou, little Suzette is once seen fitting tangerines in her tank top in a ladies' bathroom to see how she'll look when she's all grown up.
• PS238: In one story where the Revenant is training Tyler to function as a hero despite his lack of powers, he crosses paths with the villainess Kestrel. He tries to defend himself with a gadget that apparently does nothing. It turns out to be a scanner that reveals that she's had a nose job and a boob job, information the Revenant exploits to make her give back some files she stole. Later, Tyler notices the gadget gets similar results from Ms Kyle and, still not really understanding what the phrase "got some work done" means, asks her about it.
  Zodon: I never thought I'd see you in detention, Normal Boy. I'm in for a month for tampering in God's domain. What did you do?
  Tyler: I still don't know, really.
• The Punisher MAX: Jennifer Cesare uses them, as she no longer has breasts due to cancer (we get to see the scars).
• Robin (1993): Tim Drake's Caroline Hill disguise basically consists of wearing fake boobs and combing his hair different. He is not pleased that this id gets asked out by guys who think "she's" hot.
• Superman: Catherine Grant, after having been gone from the comics for several years, came back from California in Superman: Brainiac having had quite a bit of work done with breast augmentation being one of the more noticeable differences. It created a hilarious moment◊ when she first interacted with Supergirl in Action Comics #868, who didn't know about cosmetic surgery and kept trying to tell her she should probably see a doctor about the "weird plastic" in her chest.
• Wonder Woman villain Gundra the Valkyrie wears chain mail, which would logically squish her boobs down. She then wears a Breast Plate on top of this armor, presumably just to look as feminine as possible.
• X-Men: Emma Frost has admitted to having had extensive cosmetic surgery (describing it as "the best body money can buy"), including breast enhancement.

Fan Works

• Early on in the Sword Art Online fanfic No Cheat Codes Available, Kazue uses a variety of methods to give herself the appearance of breasts, from stuffing newspaper into one of Suguha's bras (which Suguha walks into) to wearing bras with breast pads in them. This stops once Kazue's hormone therapy starts growing her breasts.
• Rias is accused of this by Dante in Son of Sparda D×D. A contributing factor towards her hate towards him is that his first question to her when they met was "So who was your surgeon?"
• One of the Touhou Project fandom's biggest memes is the idea that Ninja Maid Sakuya uses fake breasts to compensate for her own lacking assets, especially since she works with Statuesque Stunner Meiling (note that in canon, characters are all drawn as roughly the same size). This has occasionally spread to different characters having similar issues with the older and/or more powerful denizens of Gensokyo.

Film — Live-Action

• One scene in Absurd Accident has a couple on a blind date get arrested for hit-and-run. The officer says that they'd better not lie anymore. The woman, panicking, says she'll tell the whole truth. She then proceeds to take off her wig and her fake eyelashes, and finally, to her date's astonishment, she pulls some rubber falsies out of her blouse and throws them away.
• In Animal House, Pinto hooks up with a girl he met in the supermarket. As he struggles to take off her bra, she unhooks it herself, then falls unconscious. Pinto finds himself with two handfuls of toilet paper.
• In Anything For Love (a.k.a. Just One of the Girls), Chris is posing as a girl and gets help from his sister. She stuffs a bra for him to create a believable bust line. Chris is unimpressed and says he likes breasts that sit high. His sister then tells him that means that he likes Kleenex and real breasts don't sit that way.
• In the 1977 film of Are You Being Served?, Grace Brothers are selling an air-expandable bra. It provides a useful distraction at one point, when Camp Gay Mr Humphries is being pursued by a randy revolutionary.
• In Dead Presidents, the protagonist sleeps with his girlfriend the night before he goes to war in Vietnam. As he takes off her shirt, he notices that she has her bra stuffed with tissue but tells her he doesn't care.
• In Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988), when Bob becomes infatuated with Elvira, this infuriates Patty (his buxom love interest). When she gets into a fight with Elvira at a church picnic, Elvira holds onto her shirt and punches her. We quickly see her buxom figure was completely this trope, as a large set of Fake Boobs rips off. Since it was a public reveal, she stops wearing her "enhancements".
• In Hairspray (1988), one of the girls augments her bustline with tissues in her bra. One of the assistant directors holds up a sign "NO FALSIES" — she denies having them, though.
• In the film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, during the final scenes we see that Hedwig's bodice is stuffed with tomatoes. The song "Angry Inch" refers to making "tits of clay."
• In Mean Girls, Regina George's mom has a pair that are so plastic that when her dog starts chewing on them she doesn't even feel it.
• The girls in Now and Then discuss various ways of stuffing their bras, including filling balloons with pudding instead of water or blowing them up.
• In Porky's II: The Next Day, part of the plot to take down the corrupt government man involves fake boobs full of cream corn and vegetable soup that the girl opens up and empties as fake vomit.
• Prom Wars: A flashback shows Jen B. making out with a boy who finds out she padded her bra when some tissue paper accidentally falls out of her blouse. He laughs at her and fakes blowing his nose with it. The moment Diana reminds her about that, Jen is bitter enough about the event to agree to Diana's plan to make the boys compete for the right to have prom dates.
• There's a whole scene in Wild Wild West where Jim is telling Artie that his fake breasts don't feel right because they're too firm and don't have any give. He dumps out the buckwheat Artie used for filling and uses warm water instead.

Literature

• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.: Cotton balls.
• Discussed in Aztec. Blood Glutton insists on buying slaves himself for the group's trade voyage, because some slave traders stuffed wax under the chest of male and female slaves (resulting in impressive pectorals or the appearance of breasts, although the latter melted and drooped on a hot day).
• In Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts, Minami and Mizuki, the two girls competing for Akihisa's affection, learn from his big sister that he's into girls with big breasts and ponytails. The girls have only the latter and only the former, respectively. This leads to Minami attempting this trope the next day. But then in comes Kouta with a needle...
  POP POP!
  Kouta: Sorry. Can't have you making a mockery of the female breast.
• In The Clique, Alicia Riviera's breasts are fake in a more literal sense, being implants. Much ado is made about how silly a prepubescent girl looks with massive implants.
• The Fairy Godmother: Delphinium stuffs balls of wool in the top of her corset.
• In Girl, Fifteen, Charming But Insane, Jess stuffs her bra with plastic bags filled with minestrone soup. Hilarity Ensues when they're popped.
• KonoSuba: According to Aqua, Eris uses pads on her breasts. She uses this to blackmail Eris into giving up Kazuma's soul, and later uses it to prevent a follower from being tempted by the church of Eris. Kazuma is appalled.
  Kazuma: Is it okay for a goddess to get by by selling out her younger co-worker like that?
• Millennium Series: Lisbeth Salander, the famed girl with the dragon tattoo, uses these towards the end of the novel of the same name while pulling a heist. She keeps them afterwards.
• In So, I Can't Play H!, Ilia prides herself on her melons and makes fun of Lisara for only having C-cup breasts. She's eventually humiliated when it's revealed she uses an illusion spell, along with magical gel pads. Her real breasts are a cup size smaller than Lisara's; making her a B-cup.
• Used in Toradora!; Taiga isn't just very short, but a severely late bloomer. Ryuji helps her out by creating padded inserts for her swimsuit, which would otherwise make her lack way too obvious. Taiga was so pleased with them she declared she'd wear them on her wedding day.

Live-Action TV

• Blackadder episode "Beer" from season 2 has a party where the participants don huge comedy breasts. Melchett turns up only to be criticised by Blackadder for not wearing any. Melchett then takes his coat off to show that he is indeed wearing a pair and his are golden (That's Stephen Fry, somewhat older, wearing them in the picture on this page.)
  Blackadder: You really are a beginner, aren't you Melchett? Why, you're not even wearing a pair of comedy breasts.
  Melchett: (removing his coat) Au contraire, Blackadder.
  • Later Blackadder (who's quite drunk at this point) walks into dinner with his strictly Puritanical aunt and uncle without removing the breasts. When his aunt draws attention to them, Edmund tries to play it off by saying "Oh my, my earmuffs have fallen!" and draping them over his head.
• In one episode of Clarissa Explains It All, Ferguson reveals that Clarissa stuffs her bra.
• The Cosby Show: Vanessa wants to make a sing-and-dance video at the mall. Claire pulls the stuffing out of her bra.
• On Degrassi: The Next Generation, Maya has A-Cup Angst and feels that she isn't attractive enough to get into the Garage Band she's auditioning for. On her friend's advice, she gets bra inserts, but uses them wrong and they end up falling out during the audition.
• In one episode of Drop the Dead Donkey, Globelink gets a new hire with huge boobs, and Dave and Henry get into a high stakes bet as to whether they're real, with Dave insisting they are. Eventually, he just asks her and is told they're not. His reaction to losing the bet leads her to conclude he feels very strongly about natural breasts.
• An episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air concerns Ashley stuffing her bra at school to get more attention.
• In Just Shoot Me!, Nina is offered a free procedure from a plastic surgeon and is considering breast augmentation. So she goes around wearing D-cup inserts to get a feel of them.
• Several times on Laverne & Shirley, Laverne mentions that Shirley stuffs socks in her bra.
• In an episode of Little House on the Prairie, the adult Laura recounts an incident of trying to stuff three apples down the front of her dress, with predictable results.
• Mythbusters once tested whether men or women were better at driving. To keep the tests fair, the driving instructors who were grading them couldn't know whether each driver was male or female, so they were dressed in concealing clothing and the men were given fake breasts.
• Part of Jan's character arc/breakdown on the US version of The Office. Several episodes after Michael describes her chest as "nothing to write home about" and "shrunken chesticles," Jan gets a breast augmentation. The actress doesn't—on the DVD commentary she complains (jokingly) about the push-up rig and days when she couldn't wait to get out of it.
• In one episode of Popular, a pneumatic enhancement bra winds up as (in the principal's words) "a Hindenburg-like lingerie disaster".
• Step by Step: One episode dealt with Al's troubles with body image as she started going through puberty. She cut a football in half and stuffed each half into her bra. After having a talk with her about what she was going through, her mom said "and Al, those are too big for me."
• The makeover series The Swan required breast implants for nearly all the contestants as part of the makeovers.
• A humorous example happens in the sketch comedy Touch Me Im Karen Taylor when our protagonist is seeing a councilor. The councilor tells Karen to feel free to use the tissues, so she uses them to stuff her councilor's bra to make herself feel better.
• On one episode of Will & Grace, Grace is worried that a newspaper photo of her makes her look more endowed than she actually is, so she goes to a gallery show wearing a water-filled bra. Unfortunately, it springs a leak.
• In an episode of The Wonder Years, a legendarily endowed cheerleader is revealed to have stuffed her bra, leading to the characters being very disappointed.

Music

• In a behind the scenes look at Atomic Kitten's Greatest Hits Tour, Jenny Frost showed the costumes they wore for the show, and for one of her looks she wore a bra with lots of gel to pad her breasts out.
• Mentioned in the live version of The Cramps song, "She Said".
  I grabbed a hold-a her inflatable breasts,
  Took a big bite and my dreams were ruined.
• In the Lords of Acid song "I Must Increase My Bust", the singer briefly attempts to look larger by stuffing her bra with melons. However, she forgets that melons rot...

Professional Wrestling

• Nearly all female wrestlers who have an obvious access to or any pressure to get, particularly WWE Divas and TNA Knockouts, have had breast augmentation surgery. Those that can't afford it or for whatever reason refuse to be cut into sometimes opt to wear multiple bras (often "pushup" bras to boot) or put padding in their ring gear for a similar effect.
• Stephanie McMahon got hers in 2000, and fans took notice so much that Chris Jericho cut a promo Lampshade Hanging that "Our Billion Dollar Princess sure has grown - in at least two places!"
• WWE gave Mae Young fake boobs, but in this case it was not for fan service purposes. You see, Mae Young was elderly by the time she got a contract with the company, so obviously it would be a hilarious joke if she flashed the audience. So why the fake boobs? Her real breasts were deemed not disgusting enough!
• Whipme Spearz, personal referee of Macaela Mercedes, wore fake breasts in his attempts to compete in PGWA and GLORY Championship matches, which award titles(a belt and a trophy, respectively) normally exclusive to women. Mercedes caught on pretty quickly but decided to get him a job as a referee in exchange for not outing him. As Jillian Hall, she decided to get implants, and Jim Cornette (who hadn't wanted her to) made it a storyline that Jillian's implants leaked into her brain and turned her into a Dumb Blonde.
• The reason The Lovely Lacey wore a shirt wearing "Silicone Free". The other half of Minnesota Home Wrecking Crew, Radiant Rain, was likewise "All Natural".
• Christy Hemme embarrassed Carmella De Cesare in their match at Taboo Tuesday by pulling out the two she had stuffed her bra with. This spot was repeated thirteen years later in Premier Championship Wrestling when Joseline Navarro pulled out Queen Aminata's right before pinning her and then celebrated with them afterwards.
• Total Divas has an episode where Cameron was considering getting them. The doctor gave her a pair to 'test drive' for a week, and much hilarity ensued. She was even pranked by hiding one of them right before she went out on live TV, meaning she had to use toilet tissue to even herself out.
• The Bella Twins initially went without them in their first run with WWE. Nikki however said she didn't like how things were starting to 'sag' as she approached thirty - so she got implants. When they returned to wrestling, this meant that they had to abandon their previous Twin Switch gimmick (due to the obvious difference in breast size). In 2015 when they started doing it again, Brie stuffed her bra with tissue to try and match. And when this bit them in the ass, she removed the tissue right there in the ring to prove she wasn't Nikki.

Video Games

• Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Sharp-eyed fans noticed that post-Time Skip Edelgard had a bigger chest in her default costume than after having her class changed, and this was later confirmed by dataminers^*Every female playable character has a breast size modifier value that's used to keep their figure consistent when changing to a class that gives them a generic body model. Given Edelgard's slender figure, high station, and how fancy the outfit is, fandom concluded the dress was padded to enhance her figure.
• In Flight of the Amazon Queen, one of the first puzzles involves using a pair of "Comedy Breasts", among other items, so that Joe can disguise himself as a woman and escape the hotel.
• Uni in Neptunia series goes from modestly endowed to flat as a board when she transforms, which changes her outfit from a casual dress to a practically painted-on skinsuit, leading Nepgear to ponder if she pads her dress. Uni emphatically denies it. Whether that's true or not depends on the continuity; in the original trilogy it was heavily implied her dress was padded, but the remake continuity (including Megadimension Neptunia VII) gives her additional fanservice event images and bath towel-clad paper dolls that show she has a figure appropriate for her visible age and her flat Super Mode is the universe having a laugh at her expense.^note Out-of-universe, it's a reference to the PSP, the console which she's based on, having slimmer models down the line.

Visual Novels

• Geiru Toneido from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice is a balloon artist with a certain other pair of bouncy balloons that have The Judge enthralled. That's not a euphemism. During her Villainous Breakdown they pop, revealing that she's actually completely flat-chested.
• In Umineko: When They Cry, Shannon's breasts are confirmed to be fake by Word of God. In the manga, it's revealed that Sayo Yasuda, Shannon's true identity, never grew breasts at all (which is heavily implied to be because they were designated male at birth but Raised as the Opposite Gender due to their damaged sexual organs) and they are very insecure about this.

Web Animation

• Manga Soprano: Nana from the episode Heaven forbid a pretentious woman with falsehoods in a night pool is a liar who tries to make herself look good, but ends up shoved into a pool by a playboy while flirting with Narita. Not only her makeup comes off in the water, but also her padding slips off and floated around at the pool.
• hololive: During the 2024 Shuffle Medley, various hololive members swapped outfits with each other and performed each other's songs. The notoriously flat-chested Amane Kanata swapped into the voluptuous Yuzuki Choco's outfit, which seemed to also massively increase her chest size, much to the confusion and astonishment of her fellow idols. At the end of her song, however, it's revealed that she's wearing fake breasts when they drop off and fall to the ground.

Webcomics

• DOUBLE K: Simon uses baseballs in his disguises.
• Megatokyo: Kimiko was seen using pads at Anna Miller's.
• In Scary Go Round Mildred is wearing tissues to pad out her chest, which is revealed when she removes one to give to a crying Shauna. Then gives her the other just in case, as she'd be lopsided otherwise.
• In Spying with Lana, Lana has had breast implants (to make them double Ds).
• In SwordCat Princess, Smiley steals Kathryn's breastplate and then wears it, proudly stating that he has "gone up more cup sizes than a knocked-up Paltrow".
• Zoe of Venus Envy, being a teenage trans woman, uses little beanbag thingies to stuff her bra. (While she does take hormones, they haven't given her much of a bust yet.) At one point this is discovered by her soccer teammates, but they just assume she's embarrassed about being flat-chested.

Web Original

• French-Italian YouTuber Tess Masazza seems to suffer from a severe case of A-Cup Angst. In her videos she is often seen stuffing her bra with whatever comes handy, including another bra top and her socks, especially when the police pulls her over for running a red light and she wants to seduce the copper to avoid a ticket.

Western Animation

• As Told by Ginger: Courtney stuffs her bikini top with bubble wrap so her breasts will appear larger and more like those on a high school girl. Two Alpha Bitches plan to remove Courtney's bikini top and expose her as a bra-stuffer. The plan succeeds, but Macie's able to get her inner tube on Courtney before can see her bare-chested while Ginger and Dodie are able to retrieve Courtney's bikini top before anyone (except for Dodie) can see that she stuffed it with bubble wrap.
• In an episode of Home Movies, when the kids are making a parody of Weird Science, Melissa wears a pair of balloons as fake boobs. Even though he knows they're just balloons, Jason still can't stop staring at them.
• The Crumpets:
  • In "Lil Wrinkly One", Granny wears fruit ones during some time at her Fake Pregnancy.
  • In "Granny Strip", Cassandra rips and stuffs her collar to make these while becoming a racy, pretendingly German girl.
  • In "Crumpity Pity", Caprice hides two big fruits when delivering them to Cassandra's impoverished house by wearing them as Fake Boobs. Her infant brother Li'l-One rips her shirt to unveil what she's up to.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) has a character called Ms Bellum, whose face is never seen, to give the impression that everyone is staring at her chest. In one episode when the girls roleplay as the other characters, Blossom stuffs teddy bears down her dress to play Ms Bellum.
• South Park's Wendy, at the end of "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society." She's thoroughly mocked for it (she's a fourth grader!) and is back to normal by her next appearance.
• The Venture Brothers: Dean discovers this of his Distaff Counterpart, but it's unclear from his reaction whether or not said character is just padding, or is cross-dressing.

Real Life

• Models, actresses, strippers, and porn stars often get breast implants as a way of boosting their careers. There was even a controversy about a stripper who tried to write off her breast augmentation as a business expense for a tax deduction. Note that this is entirely plausible under the Internal Revenue Code.
• Melanie Griffith went for breast augmentation surgery in the middle of shooting The Bonfire of the Vanities, requiring a re-shoot.
• Literal "breast plates" exist, with the ones linked specifically being advertised for cosplayers who want to match the chest size of any character they dress up as.

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