Some of you might know, that I've been an active member of the Busenfreundinnen for a couple of years now.
Busenfreundinnen.net is a german bra fitting community that offers general advice on bra fit, sizes, styles and brands, which includes the possibility to submit your measurements and 'online brafitters' will recommend a few sizes in order to help you to find a starting point for your bra quest. Since there are very few shops in Germany that actually stock 'exotic sizes' such as large cups and/or large or small bands, most of us heavily rely on online shopping. And when shopping online you have to have at least a vague idea where to begin with, as you can't simply order ever size available. ;-)
However, as you can imagine it's pretty much guesswork to deduce a size from the five measurements we ask for. So our suggestions are always accompanied by the advice that finding the right size and style is something you can only achieve by trial and error.
A main problem of the online fitting approach is, that most women do not have a clue how to recognise a properly fitting bra since they've never owned one. They are used to bands too wide and cups too small and often they're also kind of afraid of large cup sizes which they associate with Pamela Anderson boobs. They are troubled by the deeply rooted idea, that having to wear an 'exotic' size means being different from the 'normal' or 'ideal' women, or simply: not being beautiful. The Polish bra fitting community has coined the expression 'Letterphobia' for this irrational reaction to the suggestion of a D-plus bra size.
Many women who overcome this fear of abnormality tend to go from one extreme to the other. They just reverse their old habit of wearing bras that are too loose in the band and too small in the cup into buying bras that are too tight and too big in the cup. Sometimes this is due to an unconscious translation of the perception of their old size into the new and wider scale of sizes. For example, if you've been wearing a D-cup before the fitting, you think of your breasts as rather large and would go for a G-cup, which feels similarily big in your post-fitting-mindset.
This change of perspective is also fueled by the anxiety to repeat old mistakes and as a result a lot of problems concerning size are ascribed to known sizing problems, while - in reality - this is not the case. On the contrary. One good example is a center gore that is not lying flat against the breastbone: this can be caused by too small cups as well as by wires that are too wide and form a triangle. (It's hard to explain and even harder to illustrate. I tried drawing a picture but failed epically. Eventually you'll understand what I mean when reading on. *keeps fingers crossed*)
We've seen this phenomenon of - how we call it - Reversed Letterphobia in quite a few women over the years and I myself suffered from it for a while. So this posting goes out to all the over-enthusiastic girls and women who recently discovered bra fitting and are looking for their proper size!
So, how can you check if you've fallen victim to reversed letterphobia?
The first step is to check the wires of your bra:
Do you generally have the problem, that the wires are significantly too wide for you?
In order to decide if your wires are just right or too wide/narrow, it is important to know where your breast tissue ends. Best thing is to lift your breast and push it a little to the side. Mark the line with an eyeliner or a similar pencil. Then, just like in a breast examination, feel for breast tissue beyond this line to make sure there are no glandular tissue outside the visible breast area. The wire should enclose all breast tissue!
While wires pressing into breast tissue can be uncomfortable and even dangerous to your health, wires that are too far way from the actual breast lead to a loss in stability of the whole construction, since it is vital for the support that the breast tissue fills the cup. If this is not the case, a lot of the uplift has to be achieved by shortening the straps which then take on too much of the breast weight. Plus, your band can appear to be too lose, because the wires artificially extend the length. (Same as a band can feel too tight when combined with cups too small.)
So, if your wires tend to be too wide, a consequential problem - besides the loss of support - might be the waste of cup volume to a part of your body where (in most cases) there are no boobs, meaning the area under your arms, while you lack the space in front and the breasts bulge over the cup. Sometimes this 'misplacement' of the breasts inside the bra even leads to the center gore being pushed away from the body which usually indicates a cup too small. The natural step seems to go up a cup size, and probably even down another band size, because you lose even more support because of the larger/wider cups.
As a consequence of this essentially wrong fit, a lot of unpleasant side effects show up, for example wires, that dig into armpits, sides or breastbones or are simply too long for the base/root of the breast, so they either poke into your arm or are not sitting properly under the breast but keep slipping downwards. Due to the lack of experience in properly fitting bras and to the fact that the new bras are way better than the bras they wore before, many women accept these problems as a kind of necessary evil.
To break the circle of letterphobia, I recommend the following steps:
★ Check out if your wires are distorted when wearing a bra.
Using a bra extender might be useful. If there is excess fabric in your cups when wearing a bra with an extender, then you might consider wearing a smaller cup size.
★ Lengthen your straps.
If you always go for the smallest adjustment (and are not exactely petite), you might reduce the volume of the cup significantly. Just as always using the full lenght of your bra straps might indicate a cupsize too small, the other extreme might hint on a size too large or a cup too deep. (I plan on writing a follow up on size problems concerning especially smaller or more shallow breasts.)
★ Place your breasts in the cups like they're meant to.
The style and cut of a bra does not necessarily match your natural breast form. A lot of larger boobs are very close together, with a lot of volume to the front/center while most bras are constructed to push the bras to the side. While your breast tissue might not stay there, to check out the size and volume of the cup, it might be helpful to arrange your breasts like the bra wants them to be. For example pull them a little to the side. If your bra suddenly appears to be too big, its style simply does not fit you.
Of course not all of the problems mentioned above are signs for a case of Reversed Letterphobia. I only wanted to write a few words on the matter since I know that it poses a common problem. Especially if you have to rely on online shopping, it's impossible to try many different sizes so you probably will order only the size that usually fits best. This lack of comparison might result in the described misinterpretation of fit and size.
Is there a connection between Reversed
Letterphobia and The War On Plus-4?
Not necessarily of course! Plus 4 certainly cannot be considered a proper sizing method these days! But I'm still sceptical about the idea of using your underbust measurement as direct indication of your band size. This of course is only supposed to give you an approximate idea where to begin; but then enthusiasm sometimes tends to be a bit dogmatic and numbers in general seem to wield a kind of magical power... So if I'm reading something like "If you can close the band on the tightest hook right away its too wide" or "You measure 28 inches so you *have* to wear a 28 band" I grow a little wary.
Of course you should not
have to wear a new bra on the tightest hook but simply that you could do it does not say anything, really. You should not go for the smallest band you're still able to close but for the band size you
need to achieve proper support. I understand that sometimes it makes sense to chose 'conservatively', meaning when between band sizes going for the smaller one in order to get the most out of your bra. (I've also had styles that stretched so much over a couple of months that I could not wear them anymore.) But then you also have to take into account that bands will wear out faster if you constantely overstretch them.
Back to the numbers-problem:
At Busenfreundinnen.net we ask for two underbust measurements, the usual one which is to be made with empty lungs and the tape measure pulled tightly but without cutting into the skin, and then another one with the tape measure pulled as tightly as possible. One of the ideas behind this approach is to determine how 'squeezable' a person is.
The more squeezable a person is, the tighter the band can and probably should be as there seems to be 'natural padding' and this padding gives in to the band. But there are also very slim women, women with rather wide ribcages or simply a lot of muscle who are not squeezable at all.
For example, testperson A measures 71cm (tight) and 67cm (supertight) which means usually you'd recommend a size 70 [EU] bra - which translates in 32 [UK|US]. This, of course, is much too wide. So unless A has rather large breasts, we would recommend trying a 65/30-band. A lot of women are pretty happy with that size - and it really does fit them!
Testperson B on the other hand measures 71cm (tight) and 63cm (supertight). This drastically increases the probability that only a 60/28-band will provide enough support.
If we only take one measurement into account we would neglect the different bodytypes. While 28 inches equals a 28 band for person B, for person A it might be too small. The perspective of course is depending on the different sizing system: While in the continental system 80cm underbust usually translates into a band size 80, the hegemonic approach in anglophone countries is adding 4 to 5 inches to the actual measurement. So while we have to subtract to get the proper size, you simply stop adding.
Transferred to our bra fitting system, this means subtracting 10 to 12.5cm from every tight measurement regardless of body shape. This results in recommending and wearing band sizes that are about two to three sizes smaller than usually advised - which works for some people and for others it doesn't.
Apart from (subjective and objective) squeezability it also depends on the size of your boobs.
The larger and heavier the breasts are, the more support they need, so a women with larger breasts probably has to wear a tighter band to get a proper fit than a woman with smaller boobs.
And then, last but not least the stretchiness and lenght of the band in question (styles and brands tend to differ a lot, as you all know) also determines which size might fit the best. Unfortunately there are a lot of styles around which go up to large cups (for example up to J) but are far too stretchy to support breasts as big.
So, put in a nutshell: Don't put too much trust in numbers and go for as much comfort as possible when deciding on a bra!
Thoughts, critique and spelling tips are highly welcome. :)
For an explanation what 'The War on Plus 4" is all about, check out
Bra fitting : why are companies still ‘adding 4′? by Busts 4 Justice and similar postings in the english boobosphere.
Dieser Beitrag richtet sich vor allem an die englischsprachige Blogosphere, da es zum Thema eigentlich schon massenhaft Material bei den Busenfreundinnen gibt, beispielsweise unter Umkehrte Buchstabenphobie oder Das zu breite Bügel-Phänomen. Bei Bedarf reiche ich gerne eine Übersetzung nach. :)
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