Pretty Price Check: Your Friday round-up of how much we paid for beauty this week.

• 27 inches: The waist size of the new male mannequin, down from 33 inches in 1967. Because we love when body shame becomes equal opportunity. (Via Salon. Also, don’t miss Cathy Horyn’s fascinating New York Times piece about what mannequins tell us about ourselves. Yes, in case you can’t tell by my blog’s header, I’m a little obsessed with mannequins.)

• 2 staffers at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center are on paid leave pending an investigation that they were running a “makeshift nail salon” in the NICU. Yup, painting nails “on top of the high frequency ventilator.” Because babies in intensive care need a nice dose of formaldehyde, acetone and the gobs of other chemicals in nail polish. That’s how we’ll make them stronger. (Via the LA Times.)

• 38DD: The largest size that most bra manufacturers will make.

• 36DD: The median bra size of American women. Which means a whole bunch of ladies will pay for bras bigger than a 38DD. But the bra folks say they’re too hard to make. Dear bra-makers, stop make such cheap-ass bras. (All via Jezebel.)

• 40 percent of young breast cancer survivors are deemed “estrogen receptor positive.” Which means that exposure to estrogen can lead to a recurrence. Good thing beauty products are filled with so many types of synthetic estrogen and estrogen-mimicking ingredients says a new study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. (Via CBS Atlanta.)

• Required Reading:* Click: Moments When We Became Feminists (Seal Press) by J. Courtney Sullivan and Courtney E. Martin. Her moment involved fishnets.

• New favorite blogs:** Dances With Fat, who reminds us that hating on thin girls doesn’t solve the problem either. And Eat The Damn Cake, who wants you to wear whatever you want, no matter how you feel about your stomach. (I’m working on it!)

*A new component of the Pretty Price Check wherein I direct you to some awesome new book about beauty, feminism, what have you. Mostly to help myself stay on top of this stuff. (You don’t actually have to read it. There won’t be a quiz. But you should.)

**Another new Pretty Price Check thing. Which is pretty self-explanatory. The other explanation being I was getting bummed about always ending the week on a lot of bad beauty news. So now we’ll be balancing all that with friendly reminders that a lot of awesome people are working hard to lower the price we pay for pretty.

[Male mannequin photo via New York Magazine, who has more fascinating size stats to share.]