A couple of weeks ago Ally from Guilty Pleasures, reached me via Twitter and asked me if I could write a guest article for their page regarding bra fitting .

I was flattered with the request, so I decided to work on it . The article is named "How to find the proper bra". They did a great job adding the pictures and format to make it look pretty

I hope you like it! , please let me know what do you think of it!

Last month, after the site went finally public, I got contacted by two polish women who run two very interesting Bra blogs (both in polish).

• Balkonetka
• Stanikomania

Julia, from Balconetka, was kind enough to write an article about Bratabase.

Both sites make great bra fitting and reviews.

The Bra fittings in Stanikomania display women of several sizes wearing bras that would normally be wearing (wrong ones). And displays side by side how would the same girl would look in a proper fitting bra. The difference is always amazing.

Balkonetka's Bra catalog is an amazing list of bra reviews and pictures added by users, It has a lot of what Bratabase wishes to be .

It gets updated daily with several bras of different brands and sizes ranging from A to L cups!

Imagine finding this note inside your new bra packaging:

"Hey Georgeous, Nice stuff! If you fancy giving me a private show, call me on 07841 , Matthew J xx"

Well, that's what Emily McNulty found when she opened the package sent from Bravissimo. Somehow a man that responded to the name Matthew Jones snuck that message inside the bra package.

She called to the phone number on the note and the man who answered hung up after she asked about the note, he wouldn't answere on further calls.

A Bravissimo representative affirms that no Matthew has ever worked for them, and they offered vouchers as an apology.

Via TMZ I just found out that Marge Simpson (yes, as in Bart Simpsons' mother) will be on the cover of November's Playboy Issue.

She will have a three page special inside the magazine where she'll be wearing sexy cartoon lingerie , I just hope that she doesn't do any nudes O_o .

This past November, Bratique Helene opened its "virtual" doors to the public. Here you'll find clothes designed to fit the fuller busts. They have a sizing system based on bust and waist measurements allowing you to choose between "Well Endowed" and "Really Well Endowed" for all the size ranges.

Inpired and named after her mother, Carissa Brown launched the store after rejecting positions in the lingerie industry and choose to stay at home, designing clothes that aid the problem that her mother, herself and many other women go through when shopping for tops. Fitting a large bust.

Finding herself struggling to get clothes that maker her feel confortable, she started researching the market, the woman shape and increased her skills which lead to her friends and friends of friends to ask her for advice when shopping for clothes. With this skill in hand, her clothes add structure, room and seams where the busty body needs them so its figure is flattered.

Her clothes are manufactured in Dallas, with a variety of fabrics and designs and thought out to celebrate curvy women, enhance their waistline, cover the chest and look elegant in order to make their clients feel sexy.

In may 2007 Helene passed away, this sad eent gave Carissa strength to move on and Bratique Helene became her homage to her best friend, Helene.

if GOD can walk me through a nightmare, he can walk me through a dream as well.

One of the biggest UK lingerie brands, Ultimo, decided to put their bras to the test to see how they held up ( literally ) under several G forces.

Check how they performed on several rides at the Alton Towers Resort

As you can see, at the end of the day the bras proved to be up to the task keeping all the wobbly bits in their place.

If happen to know a busty and thin lady close enough, you've probably heard her complain about how hard is to find bras that fit.

There are two ( actually more ) reasons for this:

The first one is easy to understand. It is hard to find the size, no store sells bras over a D cup in a less than a 36 band. Stores don't focus on that market because they assume it's not profitable, lets just cater to the masses (with less boob mass).

Now, here's the fun part

The second reason is a tad less obvious. The cup sizes on smaller bands increase at a bigger threshold than in bigger band sizes. Now why is this?

One inch represents 1/32th (3,125%) parts of a 32" band size, and that same one inch represents 1/40th (2,5%) of a 40" band size.

As the band size goes up, the inch difference that determines cup sizes becomes relatively smaller ( 1/32 is 25% bigger than 1/40 ).

How is that a sizing problem?

This means that cup sizes in smaller bands are going up faster than in bigger bands. This means there are less "in between" sizes.

With the previous example in the 32 and 40 bras, since the cups go up 25% faster in the smaller band, every 5 cups increase in the 40 band you only get 4 cup changes in the 32 bra.

It's like bigger band sizes have small, medium and large options, and smaller sizes have only small and large options .

Lou Lingerie's website, is quite interesting, it has a full window video that gives you the experience of shopping with them, and trying on their clothes with the help of a fitter.

I was surprised with this way of showing their products

This time 320 were stolen from a Victoria's secret store ( again ) in Evansville.

The bras stolen from the display drawer were valued at aproximately $14000, now how do you walk out with 320 bras?!

Mya Blue dictates a one day bra fitting course in Leicestershire.

Check course contents are:

• Origins of the bra
• Anatomy of the breast
• Sizing and grading
• Specialist bras
• Good fitting bras
• Fitting
• Review

After the course you should be able to asses a lady's bra size with your eyes and not depending on a tape measure, which makes a lot of sense. The course features models of different shapes and sizes to get hands on practice .

The course is available only for women and has a cost of 200 pounds which includes refreshments and lunch.

EN 13402 is an european standard for clothing sizing, it covers sizes from shoes, gloves, socks to jackets, shirts including bras.

Its based on the metric system and makes direct use of different body measurements to be used in different garments, neck, head, hand, arm, chest, leg, and so on.

The EN 13402 standard consists of four parts:

1. EN 13402-1: Terms, definitions and body measurement procedure
2. EN 13402-2: Primary and secondary dimensions
3. EN 13402-3: Measurements and intervals
4. EN 13402-4: Coding system

For bra sizing, this standard will look similar to japanese bra sizing, and the cup step is ever 2 cm

I just ran into this comprehensive history of the bra , it is split in pre 50s and from then on

From the many pages telling the history of the bra, this is one of the most complete and that gathers the most accurate facts

Lingerieblog.co.uk made a list with the best bras of 2008. The lists consists on:

• The most unusual bra
• Best DD+ bra
• Most Lucurious bra
• Sexiets bra

About the most luxurious bra of 2008, Id put my vote on the VS fantasy bra.

Eris Apparel is an online clothing store specialized in busty figures. What makes this site different is that the founder, Mandy Farrow, was a 36G and got breast reduction to her bew size, 34B.

Eris, LLC / Eris Apparel was founded by Mandy Farrow. After her breast reduction (from a 36G to a 36 B), she found shopping for clothing to be really fun. That is something that she had not experienced since high school. As she discovered how well clothes could fit and how wonderful she could feel in them, she wondered why she there wasn't clothing made to fit her previous figure. Mandy wanted every woman to feel happy about shopping and their bodies.

The site does not only has information about the clothes it sells, but also has useful resources on breast reduction and is very bra specialized. There is a quite interesting table that compares bra cup sizes among brands, similar to the one in Herroom

I ran into this spanish article that teaches how the french bra sizing system works. We are used to the standard US method based on inches. I always wondered what were the magic numbers for other systems.

• Band size = ribcage in centimeters + 15cm (that's the magic number)

• Cup size = Bust perimeter - ribcage, and use this table (rule)

  Range	Cup
  11 to 13 cm	A
  14 to 16 cm	B
  17 to 19 cm	C
  20 to 22 cm	D
  23 to 25 cm	E
  26 to 28 cm	F
  And so on...

• Ribcage = 71 cm

• Bust = 89 cm

• Bra size = 85C

It somewhat follows what goes on with regular US system, the steps are 3cm, instead of one inch, and 15cm magic number instead of 5 inches to the ribcage. The table, as originally shown in the article, compares bust with ribcage instead of bust with band size as we do in US system.

Good to know how it works, still... the same measuring and rule system prevails which will suffer from the same issues as the bra sizing system we know.