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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I think you overestimate how many women care about the letter associated with their cup size. And how many men even know their partner’s cup size. Yes, many women are self-conscious about their breast size but cup size isn’t analogous to “penis length” where the literal number matters. Like it’s kind of an in-joke among women that “double d’s” aren’t actually all that large despite being what men associate with “big boobs.” It’s always a fun time asking all the boyfriends to guess cup sizes, my friend who has boobs so large she’s considered reduction for spine health alone always gets DD when she’s actually an H.

Vanity sizing absolutely is a thing but bra size is somewhat immune to it because getting it wrong means pain and discomfort.

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My wife's best friend in the Navy was in that exact situation. THe Navy luckily approved her request for a breast reduction surgery. But she was an H-cup prior to pregnancy. Her and her husband decided to have a kid, she got pregnant, breasts grew more and listening to her and my wife talk about it, I really felt for her. It sounds really painful. And it is also expensive when breasts are that large and you have to go to specialty boutiques.

Well, as is being discussed, the band size matters a lot when discussing cup sizes.

A 36DD is pretty large, a 28DD is not in absolute terms. But in terms of appearance, a true 28DD will look quite large on a small frame.

I would bet a lot of money that many folks would prefer to think of themselves as a 34B vs a 36A for both reasons - you might feel like you're more ideally proportioned with a smaller band size and you have a bigger cup size to boot.

> A 36DD is pretty large, a 28DD is not in absolute terms. But in terms of appearance, a true 28DD will look quite large on a small frame.

Nope. 36DD isn't really that large, and a 28DD doesn't look very large at all even accounting for the small frame. I'm a bra fitter at a specialty boutique (I also do their IT - my life is weird) and I see a lot of breasts. I'm also personally a 28GG/H and most people would consider me on the larger size of average; nobody would consider me 'large chested'. A 28DD is still going to look tiny. They just probably think they're a 34A, but in general at that size women who are fed up with bras just stop wearing them.

Something that seems to be lost in the differences between "horny men craving the DD's" and "women figuring out a practical dress" is the fashion statement made with particular styles of bra, size vs shape preferences, and the relationship of bras to other cosmetic treatments. It's quite a sociological rabbit hole.

In the midcentury the cone or "bullet bra" was really in vogue. Besides lifting the profile to an unnaturally perky shape, it did succeed at providing comfort. It was high tech fashion, for the time. But this look was unmistakably of an era. From the 60's on, perceptually natural shapes became more popular. And this trend towards a natural look probably wasn't just an isolated cultural trend or down to technical changes in bras themselves, since it came along with the growing popularity of surgical breast implants; implants disguise themselves much better.

And yet, sometimes one will come across horny art where naked women are drawn with an unnatural, torpedo shaped bust, as if they were wearing an invisible bullet bra. Is it simple ignorance of the difference? Is it the artist projecting the shape they want onto the figure? This kind of art, being a private fantasy, suggests thoughts that ordinarily wouldn't be spoken.

These questions occur rather independent of the actual size of a natural bustline. It could easily be the case that more men enjoy pointy chests and don't have the background needed to ask for it, so they ask for "large" instead, but are in turn influenced by media into a form of "large" that is unbelievable(much as how standards for muscularity and fitness have become driven by drug usage, and so imagery of "powerful" characters in fiction now often tends towards monstrous cartoon proportions and near-fainting leanness). And on the woman's side, there's a question of "do I want to stand out" that leads towards staying within the trend of natural, and therefore towards considering surgical enhancements that disguise the true intent.

Meanwhile, practical matters of naturally large chests are clouded by all of this. The bell curves of physique are certainly full of unwanted remarks and suppositions.

>> It doesn't help that I think most women would prefer (or perhaps think most men would prefer) that their bra says 32DD instead of 40A.

> I think you overestimate how many women care about the letter associated with their cup size.

I would have thought women cared at least as much about the circumference number. That's what they worry about in every other item of clothing; that's why the same clothes are a smaller size at high-priced stores than they are at low-priced stores. The letter is a measurement of whether you have a flat chest, but the number is a measurement of whether you're fat!

It's also not practical to fit into a size 32 if one's true band size is 40, any more than someone with a 40 inch waist can wear size 32 pants.

You can go the other way more easily and in my understanding/experience that's typically what happens (i.e. someone who's true size is 32DD wearing a 40A due to a limited set of options available in many brick-and-mortar stores).

Picture trying to fit an orange into a cup that's too small — there will be space between the orange and the cup, which could make it seem like the cup is too big. If you can't get a cup that's big enough for the orange to fit in, a flat plate (i.e. 40A) is the second-best option since at least it won't have weird gaps. This leads to women underestimating their true cup size.

> Picture trying to fit an orange into a cup that's too small — there will be space between the orange and the cup, which could make it seem like the cup is too big.

I'm not saying this is a good idea, but it seems like that space between the orange and the too-small cup depends on the orange being rigid, and the analogy runs into trouble there.

Breast tissue varies wildly in terms of density and mold-ability. Breast tissue can absolutely fight a bra and win slash refuse to conform.

The band size is essentially the circumference of your rib cage, which, sure, can change if you're severely overweight, but generally isn't nearly as affected by weight gain as, say, your waist measurement.

Sounds like those men didn't do their Due Diligence

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