Yes, yes they are. The change in diets over recent decades has indeed meant that baps are getting bigger. On average of course.
Bigger bras are in demand. Two years ago, the classic 34B was the top-selling size at one of Britain\’s best known department stores.
Today, it\’s a generous 34DD, which suggests that women could be expanding too.
What has also been happening is that manufacturers and retailers have been urging women to actually get properly measured and then to buy the right sized bra.
There is indeed the diet effect, there is also the Bulgarian Airbags effect but this change being noted is rather more about women actually buying the correct size than anything elese.
It’s a pity it’s only two years ago that B was the most popular.
If they’d said 30 years ago we could have speculated on the influence of changes in male preferences over time. We could call it the “Saville effect”.
Increased breast size isn’t confined to women, either.
I’m still laughing about a sign I saw some years ago outside an M & S saying “97 % of women are wearing the wrong bra.”
Bit crowded ?
Alan Douglas
Being a bit of an amateur tit-ologist, a while back I was reading a blog by a woman with ample cleavage that made the very important point about the rise of the “DD” as a description of breastular bigitude. D and DD aren’t actually that big, at least by today’s standards. A nice handful yes, but not immense. The casual use of the descriptor “DD” for Christina Hendricks proportions means a lot of women are still underestimating their bra size, because they think an E or F or GG or whatever is the kind of size only artificially embiggened pornstars wear.
Also, this just might be proof that Lamarck was right all along.
Could that be attributed to Polish immigration? 🙂 Statistically speaking
An ex-GF of mine told me a lot of girls where a too-small bra, especially when they go out, in order to make their tits look bigger. You can tell this is the case if the strap on the back arches upwards instead of running straight across.
*where* should be *wear*, obviously.
Breasts are fascinating. Thank you Tim for bringing the subject up weekly.
From an evolutionary point of view it’s hard to account for our interest, however. There is no correlation between breast size and ability to feed a man’s infants.
Here’s an alternative explanation. The switch to small stomachs happened 1 or 2 million years ago. (Chimps have vast paunches still.) Instead of fire being tamed 50,000 years ago, scientists now think cooking may have been invented around the time our guts got smaller.
Cooked food has 10 – 2o times the nutritional value of raw food. The attraction of a small waist is a marker of fitness: the girl is good at keeping the home fire burning at a time when fire was crucial but maintaining it was a bit hit and miss.
Hence waist measurement is the primary driver. But your waist looks thinner if there is a contrast with… big tits. Hence tits will grow.
Everyone knows Marie Antoinette had a 17 inch waist. How many people know her cup size?
How many people know her cup size?
They hadn’t been invented yet. It’s like asking whether Jesus had an HGV license. 🙂
Evolution? Here’s my favourite speculation; human lovemaking involves neotenous aspects, for instance kissing itself apparently is a recapitulation of mouth feeding of babies. Ergo, at some point in our evolution, as human lovemaking developed a repertoire, neotonous nipple suckling became part of that repertoire. Show a man a nipple, the first thing he wants to do is suck it.
Any accumulation of breast-like fat, however small, enhanced the psychological experience of this. Hence, men were attracted to breast-like fat deposits, those girls got more guys, and runaway sexual selection resulted in the fake breast-of-fat we all know and love.
That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
I thought that face to face sex as a result of walking upright led to a shift of secondary sexual characteristics? Apes display their bums, we display our boobs.
Matthew L-
I’ve never found that one very convincing. Besides all else, buttocks are still clearly visible if a woman is standing upright and are a significant sexual attractant; secondly, boobs don’t do the job that apes’ bums do, which is signal ovulation. Plus, we’ve no actual evidence that hominid ancestors did the whole glowing bottom thing anyway. Just because many modern apes do, doesn’t mean homo habilis or whoever did. Indeed, one of the most interesting mysteries for evolution is the evolution of concealed ovulation in the female, and corresponding year round sexual receptiveness in her, unless she’s living with me that is.
Another thought; a more interesting statistic (to me, anyway) would be whether boob mass as a proportion of body mass- or body fat mass- or the bust to hip ratio- are increasing (or decreasing; it may be that women are getting bigger boobs at the expense of much more body fat in general).
Anyone have any theories on the pertness, roundness, curvature etc of a girl’s nates?
A subject close to my rancid old heart…
Any indication how much is actual increase in breast size and how much is just obesity?
“one of the most interesting mysteries for evolution is the evolution of concealed ovulation in the female, and corresponding year round sexual receptiveness in her,….”
The theory I read, it reinforces pair bonding between the mated couple. Because he’s getting his oats he hangs around. The loss of breeding opportunities elsewhere are offset by his being able to prevent another male moving in & topping the current brood preparatory to siring his own. It’s particularly beneficial to H. Saps whose offspring are dependent for such a very long time.
Oh & to connect this obsession with the nuke post above; Russian chica I know assures me , incredibly enough, they are what nature provided & that she originally comes from that part of the RF. If this is the sort of deformity we can expect, sooner someone tips a few thousand tons of high level into the Welsh Harp the better
I think there is an inverse correlation with GCSE grade inflation. A being low for bra size and high for exam grade. The opposite is going on with bra sizes. It gets easier to get a GG as time goes on and the exams get easier.
Apparently kissing is useful, IanB. It allows you to explore a multiculture of bugs in your lover’s mouth, sending signals about fitness, consanguinity, etc
It also explains why societies which seek to keep the wealth in the family by cousin marriage ban kissing.
Don’t try the tongues thing if you’re running for office, though.
Not due to climate change then?
I seem to recall reading recently that there was a vanity sizing problem in bras – the same bra is being labelled as a 32C rather than a 34B to make women happier about their size…
This tits-have-been-getting-bigger story has been a hardy perennial; I can remember the same story running in the Fail On Sunday in the mid-90s.
The upper size being 34DD is new, though; up until a few years ago, it was always from 34B to 36C.
IanB: “boobs don’t do the job that apes’ bums do, which is signal ovulation.”
Actually, boobs do tend to swell a bit during ovulation. In most cases, it isn’t that noticeable, but I do remember a girl I was at school with, whose breast size seemed to fluctuate between bee-stings and tennis balls over the course of a month…
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