Not all breasts are separated the same.  And, I don’t think most women know this.  Did you know that some women have touching or "kissing" breasts where there is no space between the breasts?  There are other women with rather wide separation – more than 3 finger widths in fact.   So, why does this even matter?  Because breast separation can have a huge impact on how a bra fits.

I think one of the most overlooked feature of any bra is the center panel or center gore. There are wide design variations.  And, how this piece is shaped, sized and attached to the cups effects how a bra will fit.

Let’s say you have touching breasts. You are one of those lucky ladies who always gets a center cleavage line.  However, a traditional center panel will probably not touch or "tack" on your sternum.  It can’t because there is no room between your breasts for its resting spot.  Consequently, your bra will look like it doesn’t fit – the center panel and wires could bend out forward, or your center panel could be resting away from your sternum.

The solution here is to find a bras where the center panel is low, or where the bra does not even have a center panel. Also look for bras where the underwires are short in the center and do not come up very high.  Plunge bras and some demi bras have these shorter underwires. A halter bra is also a good style because such a bra tends to be designed to push breasts together anyway.

At the other extreme are wide-set breasts.  These are breast where there is more than 3 fingers width of breast separation between breasts.  Because of this, touching cleavage is pretty much impossible.  And, underwires can be uncomfortable because they are spaced too close to the center and will pinch the breast tissue under the arms.

In the case of wide-set breasts, the center panel again needs to be scrutinized. If your breasts are wide-set, chances are you have never been able to create cleavage, and you have sometimes put on a bra that doesn’t catch your whole breast under the arms. The wider your center panel, the better fit you will achieve.  Wire-free bras will be comfortable.  Push-up bras where the pads are both at the bottom and side of the cups will give wide-set breasts the best breast fullness.  And triangle style bras and bathing suit tops will probably look the best.

My point in this post is to let you know that there is more to fitting a bra than just knowing your size.  Based on your breast separation, you will have more success with some styles if you know how far apart your breasts are.

Find bra styles to fit your shape at HerRoom in these departments:
Bras

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Well, the answer is "SOMETHING!"  Have you noticed all these sheer dresses showing up on red carpets lately?  How about these cut-out dresses like this one on JLo?

 Is this really all that sexy?  My mind instantly jumps to concern over a seam or piece of fabric accidentally moving and creating a TMI moment.

Here’s another example of what not to wear.  At the Cannes Film Festival Mallika Sherawat arrived at the screening of "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" wearing a sheer black gown and obvious black panties underneath.

The solution is really two-fold.  First, try and resist the look altogether and find something classy to wear.  But, if shock treatment is what you want, at least give everyone’s eyes a tease by wearing shapewear or lingerie in the same color as your skin tone.

Find shapewear that may actually work with these clothes at HerRoom in these departments:

Shapewear

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She’s young and has a beautiful bust line.  But, she’s been seen out all too often bouncing along without any bra support.  Now rumors about her lack of support are suggesting that her career could be impacted, should her breasts begin to sag.

So, here’s the reality about  breasts and sagging.  Breasts do not have muscles that you can exercise to make them firm and supported.  Rather, breasts are held in place by ligaments called "Cooper’s ligaments."  Gravity, bouncing and walking around without breast support will, over time, cause these ligaments to stretch.  It’s these stretched-out ligaments that cause your breasts to sag.  And, Hollywood does not like their starlets to have anything but perfect-looking breasts in nude scenes – which is the kind of movie opportunities Lindsay is being offered these days.

A perfect case in point is Kate Winslet’s Academy Award winning performance in "The Reader" where she had several nude scenes.  I heard more than one man comment that she had "lost her rack."  Shortly afterwards, Kate announced that she will no longer do nude scenes… I wonder why?

So Lindsay Lohan, get some support!

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We here in Dallas received an eye-full last week, when R&B singer Erykah Badu stripped naked during the middle of the day in front of families at Dealy Plaza.  Yes, the same place where President Kennedy was fatally shot back in 1963.

I’m not going to write about how inappropriate and tasteless this event was.  But, I am going to write on Erykah’s extremely poor choice of underwear.

Whoever her stylist is should be shot.  Let’s start with her bra.  A great example of a terrible fit.  See how the back is hiking up?  This is a tell-tail sign that the band size is too large. The front of the bra looked equally bad–sagging ill-shaped breasts.  Wrong bra, wrong size, wrong fit.

Now, glance down south to her bottom.  Again, a very poor fit. The panty is not covering her back side.   Ms. Badu has what we affectionately call a "bubble butt."   With that shape, she should have considered a thong – though that would have been an even more aggregious public display, or a boyshort like the one from Dumi, style 580 which would give a much more flattering silhouette.  Better yet, what about a great shapwear biker panty like the Sliminizer 12130?  Any of these would have been a better and more flattering choice.

As for Ms. Badu causing a scene of indecency in Dallas, I hope they throw the book at her.  It’s also a pretty poor example for all the young girls who saw the whole thing .  As an attempt to relaunch a has-been career, it was a case of bad decisions, top to bottom (so to speak).

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I know you may think this sounds like a silly question, but are you?  Are you pulling your underpants up too high?  I bring this up because I realized that with some of my panty styles, I was. 

Here’s a little background.  The thong as a mainstream panty option hit about 15 years ago.  And, if you remember, the initial trend setters complained it was not comfortable.  Further research discovered that these women were putting on the thongs and pulling them up so that the waistband rested high on their hips – this was the problem.  Women didn’t realize at the time that the thong was designed to sit lower on the hips. After all, low rise pants were not yet making their debut on the market.  Only strippers and showgirls knew that thongs were to rest lower on the hips.  Since then, manufacturers either made thongs with longer rises so that women could pull them up to their waist, or put tags on them to let women know they were low-rise.

Okay, so back to my question.  I was going through my panty assortment the other day and singling out the panties that I felt were not comfortable to wear.  I have all styles in my drawer – boyshorts, thongs, bikinis, briefs–you name it, I have it.  When I had finished sorting out the ones I didn’t like, I noticed something; they were all low-rise.  So it got me thinking.  I grabbed a pair and put it on like I do all my panties and realized I just instinctively pulled them up too high.  When getting dressed, I have a bit of a ritual and move from item to item without much thought. All my panties were treated the same, regardless of style.

So, this time, I put on a low-rise bikini, but instead of my normal mindless pull-up, I thought about where it should be placed and I lowered the waistband to rest more on my hips.  What an epiphany!  This panty was now comfortable.  I wore it all day and it felt great.  I can’t believe I was doing this.

Here’s the lesson; stop and think about the style of panty you’ve just picked before mindlessly putting it on.  If you have some panties you have been avoiding because of comfort, go back and look at them through new glasses.  I think you’ll be as surprised as I that many pairs really are comfortable when put on correctly.

Find thongs and other styles at HerRoom in these departments:
Panties

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I think all of us at one time or another have wondered about the proper sequence of undergarments.  Let’s say you have a pair of pantyhose, a panty, and a piece of shapewear.  In what order do you put them on?  Do you wear all of them or forfeit something?

We posed this question to 13 of our shapewear vendors including Spanx, Bali, BodyWrap, Va Bien and TC Fine.  We were stunned to hear they all had the same response.  It was, forget the panties, put on your pantyhose, and then put on your shapewear.

Are you surprised?  We here in the office were.  For starters, most of us felt panties should be worn.  The reason the manufacturers feel they aren’t necessary is because they all make shapewear with a cotton crotch or an accessible crotch.  Therefore, shapewear is specifically designed to eliminate the need for panties.

I took a poll of the women in our office about this.  The responses fell roughly along age lines.  Our younger crowd agreed about not wearing panties.  Many had tried panties on under their shapewear, but found that the panty created an additional line – even when they tried laser edge cut panties like Commandos.  Our more mature crowd simply likes the idea of panties and wouldn’t consider not wearing them.

The reason pantyhose go on first is because if put on over shapewear, they tend to slide down due to the slick nature of the shapewear fabric.  You can spend the night feeling your pantyhose inching down your body and finding yourself in the ladies room several times in order to pull them back up. The panthose can also cause a line that otherwise would be smoothed out if shapewear was put on over it.  Now, that said, there are several shapewear pieces that have silicone gripper tape along the legs to keep the shapewear in place. Putting this gripper tape on top of pantyhose renders it worthless, and could possibly cause a run in the pantyhose.  So, there can be some conflicting results in this situation.

Personally, this is what I do.  I don’t wear panties.  I also don’t wear pantyhose.  If I want leg covering, I buy thigh-high stockings.  Since my shapewear of preference is a biker short style, I first put on my thigh-highs, pull up my shapewear, and make sure the top of my stockings are secured by my shapewear.  Now, I really only have one layer on, I’m comfortable, not hot, and have a very simple solution when I need to visit the ladies room.

Does anyone have any better ideas here?  If so, I hope you’ll post them here in comments.

Find shapewear at HerRoom in these departments:
Shapewear

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I have heard various lingerie experts claim that nipple show-through can be handled many ways. For example, some feel a lined bra will do the trick. Others have said that placing the nipple on a bra seam in the cups will mask the look. And, of course, there are those contour bras where the cups have a thin layer of foam or padding fused inside the bra cups.

Being skeptical of some of these claims, I decided to bring in a model of ours who has constantly erect nipples (For the uneducated, one side-effect of breast augmentation can be permanent nipple erection). I had her try on a standard molded bra, a lined bra, a seamed bra and a contour bra. I then had her put a t-shirt on over each of the bras. Let’s see what worked.

Molded	Lined

Seamed	Contour

As expected, the molded bra did nothing to conceal the situation. The lined bra seemed to have little or no impact as well. I found this a little surprising given that so many women and manufacturers swear by this solution. But, if you look at the t-shirt shots, the molded and lined bras look virtually identical.

The seamed bra did a pretty good job of reducing the "headlights." However, you have the two-edged sword of having the seam show through the t-shirt. So, basically, you sacrifice "bullets" for seams.

The contour bra option, also known as the t-shirt bra was the best performer. A thin layer of padding or foam can turn your headlights right off. But, the downside to this style of bra is for women with larger breast size who don’t want to add volume. Even that small amount of foam can make their breasts look larger.

Though I only showed these 4 bra styles, I want to also let you the reader know that there are other solutions to this problem. For example, an earlier blog post of mine discusses the Bali Concealer bras currently on the market. They too are contour, but have a very rigid flower shaped decal on the inside of the cup to keep a woman smooth across her breasts. Other options are to put one of the nipple concealer products directly over your breasts. This will smooth over your nipples and allow you to wear your existing bras. Some of the more popular products include Dimr’s, Smooth’m nipple concealers, No Peek Pads, Sassybax Nips and FashionForms Breast Petals.

For a link to all these options, go to:
Nipple concealers

There are several reasons for back fat. The first is not wearing your bra correctly. Many women put their bra on by putting their arms through the straps and fastening the bra in back. However, they forget the final step – pulling the bra back down so that it anchors under your shoulder blades. Left unadjusted, the back will creep up pushing your back skin up with it and back fat occurs. Another reason for back fat is wearing a bra with a band size that is too large. That’s right. Contrary to what you may think, back fat is created when your band isn’t tight enough. This means your bra back will creep up and push your back skin with it. The proper bra band size will anchor the back of your bra keeping it in place and giving your back a smooth look. IF the wings and back of your bra are too skimpy, this too can cause back fat.  Wider sides and back are more flattering under fitted clothes and create less bulge.  I know, it looks too "granny."  But, who’s going to know but you?  I’d rather have a wide back on my bra and no back fat, than some skimpy bra that leaves bulges. .Finally, back fat is created with age. As we get older our skin becomes less firm. And, with additional weight gain, our skin tissue becomes soft and spongy. Consequently any form-fitting garment we wear will create some indentation on our back.

I have a couple ideas for us older women. First, consider wearing one of the new shapewear camisoles instead of your bra. They are a great solution in that they give you support and smoothness all the way down past your waist. A couple of great choices:

	This is the Flexees One Fabulous Body Everyday Control Camisole. The reviews have been very favorable with several D cup women finding the support acceptable enough to be worn without a bra. For firmer control, this is a winner. Again, the reviews are raves and even from D cup size women who wear this camisole without a bra.
	The Nancy Ganz Sleek Underneath Camisole is a long-standing favorite, even with D-cup sized women. The cup area of the camisole is actually molded, so it provides support without that smushed-together look. It also receives rave reviews at HerRoom for comfort and a fresh, clean style.
	This camisole from TC Fine Shapewear is also another winner with great reviews. Unlike the others, this Seamless Firm Control Camisole 444 has a built-in shelf bra for added support, and has a gripper edge along the bottom to prevent creep.

HerRoom takes "before/after" shots of all it’s firm control shapewear to show you what kind of control and smoothness to expect. You can see from the images, that this camisole gives great lift and support to your bust, pulls in your tummy, and smooths your sides

There is a company out there that specializes in creating undergarments to eliminate back fat. They are called Sassybax. Started by a former model, the Sassybax line includes a bra, a strapless bra and two camisole styles (with and without underwires). There are no openings on any of these garments, so they are stepped into and pulled up. The back is very smooth. This comes in sizes S to XL. However, I don’t recommend it for women above a C cup because the support just isn’t there.

The Spanx company has recently launched a new bra called the Bra-llelujah. The claim is that their non-adjusting straps will remove any signs of back fat. However, the jury is still out on this one.  So far, several D cup women have complained in our reviews that there is a lack of support.

You can find more bra fitting solutions on HerRoom.