Breast milk is pretty much magic – an all-nourishing substance that provides a small baby with exactly what they need to flourish and grow. It’s a masterpiece of evolutionary engineering that we totally take for granted.
We didn’t think much could top it, until we saw an anatomical image of what the muscles in and around breasts look like, including the flowerlike milk duct structures and mammary glands.
The photo, posted by Twitter user @lemonadead, has had nearly 50,000 likes and left people baffled, amazed and, well, a bit weirded out.
There were those who were fascinated by the photo...
And if they weren’t reminded of flowers, the image brought to mind various other things...
We’ve all seen pictures of the body’s muscular system umpteen times – but do a Google search for “human muscle anatomy” and you get hundreds of images of male musculature – endless variations of that poster that hangs on the back of your doctor’s door showing a front and back view of a man without his skin removed.
Like so many things, the male version is often viewed as the default, while the female version is seen as unusual – as people on Twitter also pointed out.
There is a lot of interesting stuff going on inside the human breast: glands within glands, and lobules, and keratin plugs and all kinds of processes.
But considering how fascinated some are by the outside of breasts, we could all probably do with learning a bit more about the insides.