Breast intentions

Did you know that 70 percent of women are wearing the wrong bra size? If you’ve ever suffered from boob spillage, wrinkled bra cups or red marks from underwires or straps digging into your flesh, chances are you’re wearing an ill-fitting bra.

And this is no small thing: poor bra fit leads to health issues like headaches, tingling hands, breast pain and inverted nipples.

So how do we find the perfectly fitted bra — one that will make our boobs look as righteous as model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s in her lingerie ads?

“The real key is for you to come in and be measured, because Filipinas are a bit shy,” says Julia Mercer, Marks & Spencer UK’s technical manager for lingerie, who was in the country recently to train their local salesgirls on how to measure customers and help them find the perfect bra. “The trend is really making the best of your breast. As we get older, our breasts tend to droop. If you’ve had a baby, you lose some of the volume. So one of the innovations is to actually bring it back up and get a nice breast shape again.”

Mercer, who has been with Marks & Spencer for 30 years and is so motherly you would never feel shy in front of her, says that one mistake is that we choose bras with underbands that are too big and cups that are too small. “If you get into your right size — smaller underband and bigger cups — you’ll look better and you’ll stand better.”

The keys to finding the perfect fit are:

• The underband is the most important bra feature. It does the whole job of supporting the bra, so it’s the foundation.

• The bra’s center front wire should always sit flat against your chest. If it stands away from your breastbone, either your band is too big or your cups are too small.

• The side wires should always sit flat, and not bounce from your sides.

• The volume of your bust should be fully in the cup. It’s not about how deep the coverage is, but how much volume you get into the cup without double-busting or spillage. Mercer notes that the temptation of larger-cup ladies is to overtighten the straps thinking they’ll get support, “but what happens is the breasts move downwards and the back of the bra arcs up.”

One of things women get wrong is thinking that one size fits all, and a lot suprisingly don’t want a bigger cup size, perhaps thinking that smaller cups will make their boobs look fuller. But, at a Marks & Sparks lingerie show where models wore the wrong sizes, we learned that you have to look at body shape: not everybody can wear a balcony or a plunge bra.

“Everyone thinks they’re a 34B — they start with and keep that size,” observes Mercer. “But women start breast development at eight and don’t stop developing until they’re 19, have babies in their 20s or 30s, put on a bit of weight and so the size changes. Menopause changes your shape and makes it a bit ski slopey, so you need different cups to get lifted up and supported from the side.”

Despite what you might think, Marks & Spencer is not just about basic, everyday underwear but also sexy lingerie, shapewear and sportswear. They’re constantly looking to create the next underwear innovation that women want.

“Some of our lingerie shapes the body,” says Marks & Spencer merchandiser for lingerie Maita Mendoza. “We have cotton basics to more sophisticated silk pieces modeled by Rosie Huntington-Whitely, one of the top models of Marks.”

Another M&S asset is their range of sizes. They have the biggest line of T-shirt bras and you can find up to a 42 DD and even an E in their minimizers and Total Support lines. “We’re looking towards getting Es because even with the trend of the fitness lifestyle, we can see a lot more people who are eating fast food and are genetically bigger and more endowed,” Mendoza says.

We got a look at these bra innovations and the most promising are M&S’s Light as Air bra, for women who want the support of a padded bra with the comfort of a non-padded bra; the Vanishing Back bra for those who what to banish unsightly back fat; and the Perfect Profile bra for more mature women who’ve lost density in their breasts and want to bring their tatas back up for a more youthful, rounded look.

With Mrs. Mercer’s help I found my own perfect bra. Her expert measuring revealed that I was indeed wearing the wrong-size underpinnings. I was able to find a black-and-nude lace number in the right size from Marks & Spencer’s Autograph lingerie collection, and I don’t even have to worry about handwashing it. (You can put all Marks bras in the washing machine — hook them up first — then hang dry.) My top half is thanking me many times over.

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Lingerie and free measuring services are available at Marks & Spencer boutiques nationwide.