Britney Spears is wearing the wrong bra (and it’s driving us crazy)

Jump straight to the evidence

As celeb-gossip blog devotees, we’re delighted that Britney is getting healthy, out of rehab and no longer attacking photographers with umbrellas. Even so, we’ve still got a serious problem with America’s favourite train-wreck: girlfriend needs to do something about her lingerie. We don’t mind that she’s romping around LA in her underwear (in fact we expect it), if only she would wear a bra that actually fits her breasts. Frankly, it’s embarrassing that one of the most well-known women in the world is walking around in a state of lingerie ignorance, so we just had to call her out on it:

Britney, please get a bra fitting, because your bra is way too small. Here’s how we know:

The evidence

Brit-Brit’s bra atrocities first came to our attention with this worrying photo. In it, she’s proudly exhibiting a classic case of quadra-boob, or wearing a bra that’s so small, the boobs are pushed out into little mini-boobs, leaving questionable lumps and bumps all over your chest. Here’s the photo, with our annotations:

In the photo, the blue dashed line represents the offending bra’s underwire, and the white dashed line represents where the bra’s underwire should be. As cup sizes go up, a bra’s underwire gets wider to accommodate and support all of the breast tissue — a good bra’s underwire should extend all the way back to below the underarm, encircling the entire breast. The pink bra above cuts off a few inches before the breast ends, and all that boob has got to go somewhere – in this case, down!

How to check for this problem
To make sure you don’t have Brit’s problem, use your fingers to feel your bra’s underwire. Can you feel a bulge of tissue just behind the underwire? Does the wire end halfway along the side of your breast, instead of under your arm? If so, your cup size is probably too small – try on a bra with one size lower in the band, and one size higher in the cup, then do the test again.

Need a few more examples of this problem? Here are a few more Britney photos illustrating a too-small cup size, with illustrated explanations:

Another tell-tale sign of a too-small bra can be found at the bridge, or the panel that holds the two cups together in the centre. If the bridge lies flat against your sternum, that means the cups are adequately covering your breasts and are the right size. If you can put your finger between the bridge and your skin, that means the cups are stretching across your breasts and probably not big enough. As you can see, Britney seems to be having that very problem.

Here’s another angle on the problem illustrated in picture 1. You can see where the bra should be ending, and the big stretch of fabric that’s there instead. This points to Brits wearing too large of a back size, trying to accommodate her larger cups by giving more room along the sides. Typically, women who wear the wrong bra size have their band size too large and their cup size too small, and we definitely think that’s the problem here.

The bright side

At least there is a bright side to all of this — just as Britney has taught us to avoid marrying our backup dancers, avoid walking barefoot in public bathrooms and to avoid velour tracksuits as wedding attire, she can now serve as a shining example to women everywhere for how not to wear a bra. If these photos look familiar, check out our Top 5 Bra Sizing Myths to find out more about how your bra should fit, and how you can find out your proper size.