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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the very few comments I enter without reading the submission at all. These bra calculators are useless! Or, expressed more articulately, they may be used as a very rough starting point but are of little help.

The consensus is that a large percentage of women go through their lives wearing the wrong sized bra, generally one too small for them. The best way to find a right size, it is suggested, is to go to a large store with a professional fitter and get yourself sized

It is amazing that no good advanced solution has been deployed at scale for this problem, e.g. using 3D scanner booths to get an accurate scan and suggest a size. 3D scanning was used years ago for shoe sizing but that’s an area where the problem size is much smaller.

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A lot of "professional fitters" are just salespeople who were made to watch a 15-minute training video from corporate - and the resulting measurements are about as good as one would expect. They still try to do a decent job and will try to get the customer into something which isn't terrible, but often the stores carry a very restricted size range so the product the customer needs is not something the store has. A commonly seen trick is to just randomly add 3-4 inches to the band size, which moves a lot of women into the 32/34/36 band range.

If you want to get a good fitting you have to go to small boutique shops - easily identified by them carrying brands like Curvy Kate, Ewa Michalak, Freya, and Cleo. Going to a store like Victoria's Secret and asking for a 28J is just going to make the poor salesperson's head explode.

As to 3D scanning: Hell No. There's no way you are getting women to voluntarily have detailed images of their breasts taken by random store people, no matter how much you promise that it is "totally safe and privacy-conscious".

I think that is generally regarded as very bad advice, unless you're at a specialty bra store that probably isn't in a mall.

The "professional fitter" will helpfully fit you into whatever sizes they carry, and not all brands are the same. Cup size and shape vary a lot.

As the more upvoted comments above, the subreddit /r/abrathatfits is the place to start - most horror stories start as "I went to Random Department Store/Victoria Secret/etc. and they told me X"

Moreover, if you do any sort of clothes shopping, the individual variance between items of the exact same size/style/color is very wide.

For pants, inseam and waist sizes that are literally two of the same pants grabbed off the shelf, have more than a 1" disparity between them.

Also true for bras, even if the size is the same.

And even worse than that is comparing sizes across brands - 34x30 is not the same with every brand, or every pair of pants, and a 36B isn't a 36B everywhere.

Not being a bra-wearer I'm not really qualified to comment, but watching my wife struggle with this over the years it seems like there's really nothing to substitute for trying on bras yourself.

My wife has tried on all sorts of bras, and these calculators, and went to a local upscale store that specializes in bra fitting, and none of them really substituted for just trying them on and finding a brand that she feels comfortable in. Even the professional fitting resulted in a bra she didn't really like after wearing it for a couple of weeks. When she finds a bra she likes, she buys more of them while she can, and tries to repair them if something breaks.

As an outsider these kinds of calculators and fitters seem well-intended but off, like they can give you a good starting point but in the end it's your comfort. It seems like there's too many factors involved, and too many sizing systems, interpretations of those systems, fabric factors, underwire support issues, etc. to really know.

It's not that much of a surprise, really.

Measurements are only a starting point. Breasts have wildly varying shapes with wildly different support requirements - not to mention plain ol' personal preference. Every brand will have their own specific construction style and fit, with variations between different product lines and sometimes even individual products.

You can't fit a pumpkin into a coke bottle, even if they have the same volume. Breasts aren't any different, so you need the right bra size and shape.

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