Bras Aren’t Bad For Your Boobs
‘Perkiness’ is not a scientific term
Bras come up quite a bit in the media. Maybe it’s because so many people wear them every day, maybe because they exist in the “lingerie space”, a pocket dimension in which amount of fabric in a garment is inversely associated with cost.
Or maybe because men are a bit obsessed with boobs.
Who knows?
What we can say is that there is a Big Scary News Story about bras every other week. Depending on who you ask, they might be giving you cancer, causing and endless number of painful complications, or damaging your skin and muscle over the course of years significantly decreasing your breast ‘perkiness’.
No, I didn’t make that last one up.
Terrific Tits
There’s an amazing factoid that has been circulating around the world for years. It goes a little like this: scientists have done a study, found out that bras can cause women to have saggier boobs, and so you should stop wearing a bra.
The story has been repeated by news outlets from around the world, from the not-so-scientific Daily Mail, to the perhaps-slightly-superior IFL Science, to the somewhat-better The Guardian and Medical News Today.
According to all these news sources and more, bras cause big boob issues. In fact, most of them go so far as to say that “science has proven” that saggy breasts are directly caused by the pernicious underwire-enclosing piece fabric.
There’s just a tiny issue. Really small, in the scheme of things.
There’s no good evidence that bras cause breast sagging at all.
The Dreaded Sag
In my never-ending quest for knowledge, I set out to look for the original source of the claims that all of these articles were making. It’s fair to assume that if they’re claiming it’s been scientifically proven, that there’s a study, or more ideally many studies, that have been published in reputable journals proving this somewhat odd finding.
It’s somewhat odd because, unless your bra is fitted incredibly badly, there really isn’t much of a physiological reason why it would cause sagging. Sagging of the breast tissue is basically just due to age, as ligaments stretch and some tissue is replaced with fat.
Hard to see how some underwire and fabric could make a difference.
So I went looking for the study. I wanted to see the science for myself.
Every article mentioned a French study of 330 people, by a researcher called Jean-Denis Rouillon. He compared a group of women who wore bras with some who didn’t, and found that those who wore bras experienced more sagging of the breast, as measured by calipers. And the articles gave all sorts of information that helps with tracking down the study; the university, initial date, region, subject matter, even the type of study!
All of this should make it super easy to track down!
Except I couldn’t find it. Anywhere.
But then I thought: “this guy’s French, the university he works for is in France, maybe the work is only published in French?”
Fortunately I understand enough French to order a croissant from a supremely-patient pastry shop owner, and have access to Google Translate. Using these combined skills, I went forth and had another look for the bra/boob sagging study that everyone had talked about!
It doesn’t exist.
There is a thesis presentation, published almost ten years ago by a student of the original researcher. It describes a study of 50 women (not 330) all of whom wore bras (no control group) comparing the comfort and biological variables before and after bra wearing.
And it found no significant difference.
Media Insanity
If this is starting to sound ridiculous to you, well…there’s more to come.
It turns out that the ‘study’ that every single article was quoting was actually a declaration in an interview with France Info in 2013. The researcher was talking about an unpublished study that he had been conducting for about 15 years on 130 (again, not 330) women.
In the intervening 4 years, there has been no published study.
There may be an actual study. There may not. Based on the description that the various news outlets gave, it doesn’t sound like a particularly good study (it’s small, poorly-controlled, and uses fairly subjective measurements of ‘saggy’), but even if it was the best study ever, we wouldn’t know.
This is the research equivalent of talking out of your ass. I could announce the pre-publication results from a study that I never conducted. It would be just as valid.
And from this one, incredibly short piece — literally a couple hundred words — an entire internet mythos about how unhealthy bras are has been born. Whilst it’s not the scariest nonsense about brassieres, which is reserved for the nonsensical idea that they could be causing breast cancer, it’s one piece of complete nonsense that has literally zero literature to back it up.
Bras can cause the occasional problem. There certainly can be physical issues associated with wearing a bra too much (especially if it is badly-fitted).
But there’s no evidence that bras impact breast perkiness. Not only is it not really a scientific term, it’s also just not true.
Keep on wearing that bra, if you want to.
There’s no evidence that it’s bad for your health.
If you enjoyed, take a second to click on the heart below to let me know! You can also follow me here on medium, on twitter, or on facebook. If you didn’t enjoy, I’d love to know why in the comments, or @ me on twitter!
