Hot on the heels of shoving all manner of things up their vaginas, now ‘health’ and ‘beauty’ influencers are encouraging women to smother their breasts in toothpaste in Vaseline to reduce sagging and make breasts grow larger.

Sigh.

One YouTuber called Naturalbeauty556 uploaded a video titled ‘Tighten Sagging Breats in Just 5 Days Using Toothpaste – No Joke’, claiming that a mixture of toothpaste, plain floor, egg whites, and grated cucumber will ‘tighten up your breasts like really, really crazy’.

 Another channel, Susana Home Remedies, suggests putting toothpaste on your nipples and rubbing Vaseline on your breasts to make your breasts grow larger. These videos have received millions of views from people desperate to change the shape and size of their breasts without surgery.

It’s not clear how many of them have actually attempted the technique. But before any more people rush off to buy some tubes of Colgate, it’s important for us to make clear that rubbing toothpaste on your breasts will not make them any bigger. It will also not reduce sagging.

In fact, it won’t really do anything apart from make your breasts smell minty. You might notice a feeling of tightness, however. That’s because toothpaste is drying, so will make skin anywhere on your body feel a bit dryer and tighter. It’s why people use toothpaste to treat spots, because it dries out oil and sebum.

Try smudging some toothpaste on your hand and you’ll feel that the skin seems tighter… but that this sensation is washed away once the toothpaste is removed. The fact is that applying something to the top layer of your skin won’t make any deeper changes to your body.

Just as a lotion can’t ‘melt away fat’, but it can make your legs shinier and appear slimmer, a toothpaste cannot penetrate deeply enough into the skin and reach the breast tissue to have any longterm effect. The same logic applies to the Vaseline. If you rub your breasts with petroleum jelly they might appear larger because they’ll have a sheen, but you won’t notice an actual increase in size as a result.

Christopher Inglefield, medical director of the London Bridge Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Clinic, tells Metro.co.uk: ‘This bizarre advice simply preys on the many women who are unhappy with the size of their breasts and who might resort to bizarre “miracle fixes” to find a solution to their problem. ‘Sadly, like a lot of guidance on the internet, the vaseline and toothpaste method of breast augmentation is fake news and pure online quackery.

‘Your breasts may end up smelling minty fresh, but it’s highly unlikely there will be any growth.’ If you prefer your evidence anecdotal rather than expert, take note of this: Beauty blogger MakeUpMesha tried the Vaseline and toothpaste trick for 30 days and reported no results at all.

‘It did not work,’ she said. ‘I tried it every night, like an idiot, had my boyfriend looking at me like, “what is she doing?”.

‘The YouTube videos said it’d increase and maximise breast tissue. No – it did not do that at all! Don’t be like me. Don’t rub toothpaste on your nipples or Vaseline on your titty-balls because it will not grow your boobs.’

Thankfully, unlike many other DIY beauty treatments, this one won’t cause much damage if you’ve already tried it. The toothpaste may be too harsh on your skin and could lead to irritation, but once you wash it off and give your skin time to recover you should be totally fine.