This update is LONG overdue. All of these changes happened during March and April and I kept distracting myself fixing smaller bugs or with other tasks but writing this post communicating what's new on the site.

This is a summary of what's new. Explanations and screenshots right after.

  • Picture Albums
  • Fixed listings search for EU/FR sizes
  • Profile country flags
  • Measurements tables charts
  • Bra ratios
  • Tools for editing data
  • Search bras in users profiles
  • More measurement search fields
  • Public measurements in profile
  • Measurements form don't require to delete the 0
  • Difference between a currently fitting and past fitting bra
  • Filter reviews by fitting bra
  • Better alterations support

Picture Albums

I meant to do this for a while. It is very common for users to want to show and share a few images of particular bras here and there. In the last batch of changes pictures gained their own URLs so they could be easily addressed but there was no way to group them together.

In some cases using Imgur was an alternative, but doing that you lose all the linking and related information for the pictures that the site provides. Something as simple as providing links to the picture's bra size and quickly go to related information for it.

So now you can make infinite picture albums and add all the pictures from the site you want on them. Whenever you are looking at a picture there will be a menu to add it to one of your albums or to a new one (just like managing lists of bras).

Here's a sample album with a few Marcie pictures.

That's right, the limitation is that you can only add pics that have been uploaded by users on the site. It is not possible to include arbitrary images.

Fixed listings search for EU/FR sizes

This has been a bug that haunted many users. Given that looking at an arbitrary bra size it is impossible to know if it is EU or FR sizing, the site was not being too clever and always tried both options resulting in searches for 85F to also return 70F (band 32) and 100F (band 40) for all bras.

Now, search does a bit better not throwing results that are obviously not what you meant, but given the confusing nature you will still get results for all that match.

The "problem" that some users report about searching for 32J and getting 32GG results remains because it isn't a problem. Those 32GG bras do contain 32J in their labels for US sizes. It is just impossible to know what did you really mean with "J" cup.

To know the exact sizes for which a listing will match, there's a little text on the bottom of each listing showing its matching sizes. These are obtained from the sizing information that we have for each brand.

As always, either use index sizes or search by measurements to avoid confusions.

Profile country flags

Many of you already noticed that users now show a little flag next to their names. This was suggested by a user in order to make a bit more visible that the site is not US centric, even though the majority of users do live on the US, we never code or assume anything particular for any country. Showing flags would show the variety of users we have :).

You can set this on your profile edit page and pick your country (preferably where you currently live).

Measurements tables charts

This is a pretty big one! And I find it super neat!

You know that browse by size page that you never visit? When you go to a specific size there is now the option not just to see the models available but also to compare the measurements of all bras in that size!

For example, this is the distribution of band lengths for all bras in size 32:8

Below, you will see the measurements table of all of them (This is the same as doing a search and showing as table, but without the distribution graph).

What's neat about this page is that you can see the distribution for any measurement and click on any of the bars and see which bras match that range (which is the same as doing a search by measurements).

You can think of each of the bars as follow for any measurement:

  • Very small
  • Small
  • Slightly small
  • Medium
  • Slightly large
  • Large and Very big.

Another example. Bras in 32:8 with very deep cups sorted by narrow wire width.

You can see that Freya Arabella 32FF is the bra with deepest and narrowest cups, followed by Freya Rio 32FF and an Ava Paramount in 70H.

Another trick? You can see which brand make bras in the filter you selected. For this filter on the most narrow cups for bras in 34:9 clicking on the View brands link will show you that Ewa Michalak, Anna Pardal, Freya, Comexim and Parfait make those bras. Clicking on those will show you the selected filter for the brand models only. In the case of Ewa Michalak, here are the bras in 34:9 that have the narrowest wires. This doesn't mean that they cannot have bras available also on the deepest cup filter!

This means that you can do this for any brand as well. Remember that brand size range page you never visit? You can do the same operations for any size. Here are the deepest cup bras size 30G in Curvy Kate sorted by ascending cup width.

More tricks? If you are getting many results with 0 bras and estimated measurements you can always add &min_bras=2 at the end of your URL and will show bras that have 2 or more entries. Naturally you can use any natural number.

All this looks cool? Turns out we have had this possibility for quite a while in the search page. On any of those table screens you can click More filtering options and you'll be directed to the search by measurements page with the applied filters where you can do further filtering, such as combine other measurement ranges.

Bra ratios

This is an experimental feature. I was told by a few users that they found useful to know the bra depth ratio and stretch ratio of a bra when looking at the measurements. Which are simply the division of cup depth and cup width for depth ratio and stretched band vs band length for stretch ratio. It is trivial to have the computer calculate these, so let's see how useful they prove to be.

These numbers are not displayed by default because we want new visitors not to feel overwhelmed by math when browsing the site and increase the number of things they don't understand when looking at pages. Most likely they come with basic bra knowledge and just throwing more numbers on screen will confuse them more, that is why the ratio fields are behind a preference for you to enable. Yes you that are reading this far into the blog post ;)

Go to the account preferences page and there will be a checkbox Include bra ratios on measurements tables, activating it will make measurements tables to show the ratios.

Let's see how these work out. I still believe that the ratios are deceiving since to get a bra that fits you will end up having to have two values, the cup depth and the cup width. Just knowing the bras by ratios isn't enough unless you know the ratio and one other field. But then you are again with two pieces of information.

Tools for editing data

This is an internal change, but I had to add a few procedures and logging options in how we keep editing the bras on the database to avoid clashing and mistakenly overwriting information that other user added. Most of you won't be affected.

Search bras in users profiles

I've been wanting this for a while. If you claimed your URL you will be benefiting from the new changes in your profile. This one allows to do a search of a user's bras by name (separate from the regular filters).

Here are all the Deco bras that a user has.

Again, this is only available on the new profile page. If you have over 50 reputation why haven't you made the switch?!

More measurement search fields

I started to experiment adding more search fields on the search by measurements. This is tricky because each new field on search requires to do a full search index which is not cheap.

After toggling the "Search by measurements" fields on the search page, you can additionally expand "More filters" which for now will expose two extra fields. Search by number of hooks and filter results with a minimum number of bras added (to avoid estimated measurements).

This is the place where we can grow more search fields for more measurements, search by ratios or cup height will go here.

Public measurements in profile

For quite a while now users have been able to share their measurements by link to others. This is particularly useful for size changes, if in 2015 you shared your measurements link on a comment and measured again in 2016. The measurements linked in that 2015 comment will contain the numbers you referred to at that point and not your most current measurements that could have varied a bit from back then. I still encourage you to share your measurements by link when you can to time data properly and not confuse past and future.

Still, using Bratabase you now have a bra profile that you can share across on the Internet where other people can learn about you bra-wise. It does not seem unreasonable for you to want to share your measurements along with your bra information. This is of course optional and probably of little surprise if the list of bras is also visible by seeing the size range.

Again, this is only available for users that have enabled their new profiles. And it still doesn't look very pretty but that is being worked on :)

Measurements form don't require to delete the 0

This was something I found very tedious when adding bras measurements, especially from a phone. When clicking the next field I had to delete the default 0 value and then type in the number. Now that 0 value is only a placeholder and don't have to delete it, just start typing. Shouldn't have waited so long for this!

Difference between a currently fitting and past fitting bra

For the longest time, many users were always confused that when they reported a bra as fitting and then as not fitting the bra was still showing as fitting on their review.

The reason for this was that for users that read the site, they may be more interested of the information of a fitting bra instead of a non fitting bra. And if all fitting bras eventually change to not fitting then all reviews would always show not fitting bras. The problem was between what I wanted to show visitors and what bra owners expected to see.

The change now is to have a new state "Used to fit", so when you mark a fitting bra as not fitting any more for new measurements, the review will say that such bra used to fit at some point. That way bra owners can see that their information is correctly reflected and visitors can still see that a bra used to fit and something happened.

The side effect is that now your measurement dates are visible. So a visitor will be able to know that a bra fit you for your measurements in April 2015 and not in January 2016. Previously that information of multiple measurements and dates was kept secret for you only. But... I think that nothing too personal is being shared and the benefit is much greater.

Filter reviews by fitting bra

This one is a small but useful change. On any list of reviews on the site. Be it brand, model or size reviews. There's a small filter bar that has a few options. A new field was added to show reviews only for fitting or not fitting bras.

Better alterations support

Now you can (and should) enter the bra alteration information when adding your bra. In the past this was only available during measuring input but now it is part of the bra adding.

You will see that there is now chance to be a bit more explicit of what's going on with this bra so other users can know what's especial about it.

As always, the site will exclude the bra from average calculations if your bra has particular changes. We had to find a spot between simplicity and lost of detail to make this not tedious to new users.

PD: That cover picture is my actual scribbles when working on the site.