It’s so bad that my fiancée has some bras that say she’s a B cup and others that says she’s a D cup. In order to go bra shopping, you have to actually try them on to find out if they fit.
If I had to try on underwear to see if they fit, I might not bother with underwear at all!
Have her go and get fitted. Many women don’t know what their band/cup size really is.
Also, IMO, women’s pant sizes are where the real absurdity in sizes is.
Not much help to know what cup size you are if the bra companies are only pretending to be standardized
Only knowing your cup size is not enough. You need to know the underbust size as well. A 32D and a 34C have cups with the same volume. Sure, there is still some variance but not as much as I thought before I learned that.
Edit: This calculator and the community of the same name on the-site-that-shall-not-be-named helped me a lot in finding my actual bra size. Now my only problem is that almost no company here has more than two or three bras in that size…
Interesting website! I’ll have to remember to try this when I can find where I put my tape measure.
Personally, once I found bralettes I’ve never gone back. My boobs are small enough that they work just fine. The comfort level has gone up by like ten billion. Bras without underwire come in second but still not the greatest. I just can’t really understand bras with underwire.
Tbh, I’m able to go braless under loose fitting sweaters, but for any other shirt, I just don’t have the right boob shape for it.
I think underwire is more important the larger your breast volume is. I was recently at an event with a bunch of women who’ve known each other for a long time and we did a game where an emcee asked a question and then we went to a side of the room that fit our personal answer. One of them was 1) underwire, 2) no wire, 3) no bra. As I shuffled over to the underwire side, one of my pals joked that this was just a way to separate us by breast size. And sure enough, those of us with the wires tended to be on the heavier-cupped side, and the small number of no-bra ladies were quite petite.
I tried bralettes once and they didn’t work for me at all. I’m too big for them to provide any support so they just buckled, essentially. It’s a bummer because some of them are so cute! But my girls are just too heavy. And the only thing that keeps them in line is the damn wire. I will say that being fitted correctly does help the wire feel more comfortable though.