Women's Breasts Getting Bigger
Women’s breasts are getting bigger!
According to Selfridges of London, sales of bras with cup sizes D through G have increased by 50 percent annually since 2005. The most common bra size in the UK is now a 36D compared to 34B only a decade ago.
Helen Attwood buys lingerie for Selfridges and attributes the growing trend to our increasing waistlines.
"We are seeing more demand for the larger sizes and especially for fashionable, sexy bras in bigger sizes for younger women," says Attwood. "We are in general getting heavier and therefore more women have larger busts, but it can even change depending on the time of the month."
However, one study refutes the connection between increases in weight and bigger breasts. The Telegraph reports that researchers at the University of Portsmouth studied 300 women over four years and discovered an increase in breast size regardless of weight.
In response to the demand for accommodating bigger boobs, the department store has started to carry a K-cup bra by lingerie maker, Fantasie. This extra large model measures four feet around and each cup totals one and a half feet in width.
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Comments
Growing?
I'm convinced (with no real evidence) that it's to do with growth hormone in the food supply.
Interesting...
Increasing body weight may be one factor, but I think it's happening apart from that as well, as the Portsmouth study noted. I know quite a lot of women who are not overweight, but do fall outside the range of "normal" department store bra sizes -- hell, I'm one of them (BMI normal, bra size 32H).
I suspect that, as the previous commenter suggested, hormones are a factor, but I don't think it's just growth hormones in food. The popularity of the birth control pill means that a lot of women are regularly dosing themselves with extra estrogen -- and that may even be affecting those of us who don't take it, because I've read that a certain amount of that estrogen filters through into the water supply, where it is not fully removed by waste water treatment.
Also, there are a lot of chemicals in our environment that act as endocrine disruptors, with frequently unpredictable effects on the body's hormonal system. This is probably also a factor in the increasing prevalence of endocrine disorders such as PCOS. All of which is kind of creepy if you think about it -- we're pretty much conducting a massive uncontrolled biochemistry experiment on the whole population.
But another, unrelated factor may be that we're learning to size bras better, and to recognize that women are built in a wider range of sizes and shapes than traditional bra sizing methods have acknowledged. Most of the women I know who wear sizes above D or DD spent a long time wearing badly-fitting bras with too-large bands and too-small cups before eventually finding out there were alternatives. So it could well be that a fair number of the women now wearing F, G, H, etc. cups would have settled for a D or DD with a larger band in past generations. So that part, at least, may be a positive development.
I think it's most likely a blend of all these factors, and maybe more -- there isn't always one set cause for population-level changes.