Freya Marina Padded Half-cup

I'm not at all averse to soft cup bras. I think there are many lovely ones, and can certainly respect that they are healthier to wear day-to-day than moulded or padded bras. However, I really love the Freya padded half cups. They come in cute colors and give a very nice, rounded shape, two things which one cannot always say about soft cup bras.

The Marina has the "stocking stripe" seams, kind of like this lovely Betsey Johnson bra that I am way sized out of. 

Rounded shape! Wires very slightly too wide for me, but I expect that from most UK brands.

3/4 view: My right breast is obviously smaller than my left, which nursing has only exaggerated. The slight gaping is not noticeable under shirts.

Lots of reviews said this band runs very stretchy (like, two sizes stretchy). It's certainly on the stretchier side, but this is a 30 on the loosest hook and I measure 27-28" underbust, so I didn't find it to be too bad. That dimple in my back means my bras never ever lay flat on my skin there, no matter how tight, but the band does not ride up.

I quadboob out of this a little bit if I am swollen at all. Padded half cups don't have the same kind of give an unlined bra does.

Overall, I don't feel the most supported in this bra, but I also don't feel unsupported. I love the colors and the details, the shape it gives, and how sturdy it feels. I can nurse in this bra with only mild difficulty.

Cleo Lucy continued

Last week, I wrote about my struggles with the Cleo Lucy- namely, that it seems to have the G/GG split in design and as such I have to choose between an ill-fitting band or an ill-fitting everything else. Using this method from Hourglassy, I altered the 32FF to fit more like a 30 band. I also bent the underwires. Here's the fit pictures.

Now the Lucy is comfortable, although it looks a bit like a Frankenbra where it clasps. It stretches to 31" now, as opposed to the 34.5" it stretched to unaltered!

Some bras require too much alteration to be worth keeping. My Lucy in 28H is too big in the cups, much too wide in the wires, and the gore is so high that it is incredibly painful to wear. I tried altering the cups smaller, which worked ok, but since the band was kind of tight it pulled the wires even wider and there was no fixing the problem with the center gore. I am still trying to find that bra a home. For bras with only one thing wrong, though, alterations can be great and cost-effective. I wear this white Lucy a lot now!

Cleo Lucy: the bra I wanted to love

My first bra in a close-to-fitting size was a white Cleo Lucy in 32FF. I bought it at Nordstrom Rack, after trying on 30 other bras that didn't fit at all. In the dressing room, I was pleased- no spillage! But when I wore it a full day, a few fit issues emerged. The band is too big to offer much support at all. The wires are so wide, there is at least an inch and a half of empty cup on the sides. And I would every once in a while get some slight quadboob. Bending the wires helped a lot, though, and I sewed the band tighter. It sort of looks like a Frankenbra, but it feels much better now.

I figured I would order another Lucy in 28H, to fix the quadboob and tighten the band. This made everything worse. The wires are still huge, and now the taut band stretches them even further around me. The navy/pink color apparently has much more room in the tops of the cups than the white color so I have a ridiculous amount of empty room. And the gore is noticeably taller, so while the gore of the white Lucy sat underneath where my breast tissue becomes super close-set, the navy Lucy's wires sit right on that space, and they poke. They pooooke. It leaves deep, deep marks in my skin. Several times a day, I have to pull the wires away from my body to give my poor tissue time to feel better.

I tried to alter my navy Lucy to make it fit better. I took in the center gore, sewed up the extra space at the top of the cups, and wore it another day. It didn't help with the poking, so I popped the stitches out and listed the bra. I'm dedicated to not keeping anything I don't love.

I know the Lucy works for a lot of women. I think it's a great bra to start out with- good for full-on-bottom breasts, but forgiving enough for many full-on-top breasts too. But for me, the wires are all wrong and the balconette style is not ideal.

Are there any bras you have a love/hate relationship with?

What fitting method should you use?

There are fitting guides all over the internet. Most guides and calculators will lead you to believe you need to add 4 inches to your underbust measurement and get the difference between that number and your bust measurement. I certainly understand why retailers follow this method- it crams nearly everyone into 32-38 bands and A-DD cups, which cuts down production costs. What I don't understand is why unaffiliated calculators still use this method!

My personal favorite calculator is the one from SophisticatedPair. This guide on reddit will walk you through how to get the most accurate measurements. If your underbust measures 30 inches or fewer, I recommend setting the calculator to spit out the "moderately snug" size; otherwise, use the "very snug". (There are exceptions to this, but for the sake of simplicity, we'll stick with this rule of thumb for now.) You will get two sizes: your US and  your UK. Going with your UK size will nearly always be better, as the US market does not produce small bands with large cups, and only a couple brands even make anything larger than a DDD size in any band size.

Maybe you're surprised at what this calculator is telling you. Thinking that there's no way that size is accurate is referred to in the bra-fitting community as "letterphobia". The size you get from the calculator may not be the exact size you end up in, for one reason or another, but it is a great starting point.

Sometimes it can be appropriate to add inches to the underbust- not 4, though. Bras I Hate recommends adding 2 inches; you can read more about her reasoning here. I don't think that's the best solution for everyone, but I personally follow it because I am pretty bony, and I have problems with the wires being too wide in GG cups vs G.

It's worth noting that the reddit guide I linked tends to fail women who are larger than a 36 band or so. If you measure in that range, you have more variables to consider when figuring out your size. FullerFigureFullerBust,  XL Hourglass, and Fussy Busty are better resources for full-figured women than my blog will be.

Hopefully this was helpful and not an information overload. Feel free to leave any questions you may have in the comments.

Why write about bras?

I love bras. I really, really do.

I didn't always love bras. Back when I was in high school and didn't know about proper sizing, I hated bras. Bras to me were unbearable torture devices meant to be yanked off the second I got home. They were constantly slipping, sliding, and riding up, but never supporting. My shoulders hurt. I wanted a reduction as soon as I could get one.

I was wearing a 34DD. I should have been a 28G.

34DDs were actually a big improvement over the 36B I tried when I was a little younger, and definitely better than the 34C that a Victoria's Secret employee told me I was when she measured over an ill-fitting bra and a really tight shirt. Nevertheless, they simply did not fit.

I went to Nordstrom before starting college, hoping their fitter would put me in a better size. It was a little better, at a 32E, but the band was still too big and I had a lot of the same problems with slipping out of the cups. I didn't know that most fitters at Nordstrom still use the method of adding 4 inches to the underbust measurement to size bras, and my fitter didn't tell me about scooping and swooping all the tissue into the cups.

The last straw for me was breastfeeding. I was simply too uncomfortable to keep squeezing myself into bras that didn't fit, and so began my search for something better. I found the subreddit ABraThatFits, measured myself according to the fitting guide after I was reasonably certain that my breasts had settled on the size they were going to be for a while, and discovered that I should wear either a 28GG or a 30G.

My first reaction to finding out my new size was, "Oh, crap. Where am I going to buy bras now?" I had a hard enough time finding the ill-fitting bras I was wearing pre-pregnancy. But browsing the threads on ABraThatFits, as well as some Googling, led me to quite a few retailers that sell bras in my size.

And guess what. They're pretty.

They are not the great beige monstrosities I wore before. They are not old-woman lace and matronly coverage. They are cute.

But even better- they are comfortable.

If your bra truly fits in every way, you will not notice it throughout the day. It will bother you as little as your softest t-shirt. You might not even want to take it off at the end of the day.

So I have made this blog hoping that detailing my fitting journey helps other women to find their proper size. I'm no expert on fitting by any means, though I am pretty well-versed in the right bras for women who wear similar sizes to me. And I'm writing about bras because the right bra is a great thing. Truly.