Your Bra Is Actually Making Your Breasts Saggier, According to This French Boob Scientist

By Lindy West | April 11, 2013 | 4:55pm

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Well, it only took 15 years of rigorous study, but one French researcher has finally unearthed the truth about your brassiere: It isn’t keeping your boobs from sagging, like you thought, it’s actually causing them to sag. So take it off. Take it off!!! 911!!!!! Aaaaaaahhhhhh!!! (Oh, but not you, old ladies. It’s too late for you, the research specifies, so please keep yours caged up as tightly as possible.)

Professor Jean-Denis “Hoh-Hoh-Hohhh” Rouillon used calipers to measure changes in the breasts of 330 women over 15 years, and found that over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders didn’t do anything they were purported to do for your boulders—they didn’t alleviate back pain (in fact, they exacerbated it), and they didn’t prevent breast tissue from sagging (in fact, they caused your mamz to “wither”). The bra, he says, is a “false need.” GREAT. So what have I been doing with my life? This betrayal shall not stand!

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According to The Connexion, the findings suggest that breasts would gain more tone and support themselves if no bra was used. Researchers explain that bras limit the growth of supporting breast tissues, leaving the breast to wither and degrade more quickly.

The study found that women who took off their bras for good experienced a 7mm lift in their nipples each year they didn’t wear a bra. Researchers also found that bra-less women developed firmer breasts and saw their stretch marks fade.

Some of the women who took part in Rouillon’s study toldFrance Info that not wearing a bra helped ease their back pains.

Capucine, a 28-year-old participant in Rouillon’s study, swears by the results and hasn’t worn a bra for two years.

“There are multiple benefits: I breathe more easily, I carry myself better, and I have less back pain,” Capucine said, according to France Info.

Well, doodly-do. Quit braggin’, lady.

But Rouillon doesn’t recommend that all women run out and burn their chesticle-harnesses posthaste—it’s a lost cause once you’re already a gross old lady. “It would be of no benefit to a 45-year-old mother to stop wearing a bra,” he explained. His study, he says, is “not a representative sample of the population…It would be dangerous to advise all women to stop wearing their soutien-gorge.” So…just nubile spring fillies in the bloom of youth? Is that it? They should go braless and the rest of us human waterbeds should stay bound up, lest we encounter “danger.” Got it.

Hoh-hoh-hoh.

I mean, look. I’m not going to stop wearing a bra, because mine are stupid-big and not wearing a bra hurts (also, bras are hot!). And I’m pretty sure I’m in the “older ladies” demographic for whom sagging is a foregone conclusion. Also, magic isn’t real. Time and experience are going to fuck up your body no matter how much scaffolding and billion-dollar lotions made out of your own spit you rub on your “problem areas.”

But even if mine were buoyant and young, I probably wouldn’t trash my bra anyway. I like wearing a bra, and I don’t do shit I don’t want to do if it’s for culturally imposed cosmetic reasons I don’t care about. Because why? Back pain aside (I was never under the impression that a bra alleviated back pain in the first place), this whole thing is cosmetic. Outside of jogging or running down stairs, wearing a bra is largely cosmetic. Not wanting your breasts to sag is cosmetic. Not wanting someone else’s breasts to sag, for the sake of your eyeballs, is cosmetic and selfish. If you want to go out of your way to avoid saggy boobs for the sake of your own sense of self, or to please your partner (because you want to, not because you have to), then that’s great! Do with this confusing bra information what you will. Maybe some day I’ll look waaaay down at my old, trusty, loyal boobs and decide I don’t like their altitude, and maybe I’ll feel strongly enough to have them surgically elevated. I don’t know! Right now, I’m good.

In closing, I’m sorry that I made so many rude implications that the good Professor Rouillon is just a Frenchy old perv who wants to ensure perky mademoiselles are unencumbered just in time for summer. IT’S JUST THAT I COULDN’T HELP IT. Sacre bleu.

Bras Make Breasts “Saggier”, 15-year French Study Reveals [Counsel&Heal]