Mar 15, 2014 » All bra adventures

Mar 15, 2014

Four stores, over a hundred bras tried on, and probably going to hit up a few more.

First store: Nordstrom (out of my price range, but only place with a decent selection of attractive bras in 32DD and 34D). My hope was to try on the bras mentioned on bratabase and then find them cheaper (sales?) somewhere else. However, I appreciate having a physical store to go into, so I also want to buy bras there to keep their physical stores in business. So, I bought one $44 bra that I love. It's purple and pretty and fits nicely. So excited. There were three others I had a hard time leaving behind. I hope they go on sale.

Second store: Ross (yeah, I knew it was a stretch). They had nothing in 32DD, 6 bras in 34D and two of them looked like "grandma bras," and one 34DD that I came across while looking in the wrong sections. I figured I might as well try it. Who knows. I also tried on a lot of 36Cs just in case any of them had tight enough bands or could be modified easily. I did, in fact, find some 36Cs that will fit well until the band starts stretching. For $6.99-8.99, I'm okay with that. If you can actually find your size at Ross, I recommend buying bras there because they have a lot of the same brands for a quarter of the price.

Third store: TJ Maxx (also an unlikely candidate). There were literally 2 bras with a 32 band and they were both A cups. I did find a decent number of cute bras in 34D, but not all colors of the same style had a 34D (low stock or never carried them?). They were the store that I bought a 34D bra only to find out that it was a 34C. The outer and inner tags did not match. And I wanted the bra bad enough that I convinced myself it fit even though it didn't. However, I did find some winners there, some in 36C. Most 36Cs had very loose bands on me, but a couple felt more like 34s. I left some winners behind because they were $12.99 instead of $6.99. Lol. But I would have purchased them if I hadn't found fitting $5.99-7.99 bras. My recommendation: be prepared to try a lot of ill-fitting bras and go out of your normal size just in case. You just never know what bra manufacturers are going to do.

Fourth store: Fred Meyer. Random impulse stop. Lol. They had a better selection than I expected. Though they had the same issue of having low stock such that some colors of a style had certain sizes and the other colors had different sizes. Theoretically you can try on your size in a color you don't want and buy it in the other color online or something, but I find weird size anomalies between colors of the same style. Perhaps it is because I buy cheap bras with less strict manufacturing standards. So, I tried on lots of 36Cs, a few 34Ds, and could not find a single 32DD even though they had DDs in other band sizes. I won't go into too much detail, but the 36s were all too big in the band (as they should be), most 34Ds fit okay but I had mild quad boob with a few that I'm wondering if I should buy for a different time in my cycle. If they were not $28 each I would have given them a test go. I'm already in this over $100, so can't buy any more unless they are super cheap or so stupendous I can't pass them up. None fit those criteria. Two would have if the store had offered a 34D or maybe a 32DD in one case (the bands were just too big and I couldn't justify getting them even though they were super comfy otherwise).

I'm thinking about suffering through the mall *shudder* to try out VS and JC Penney. We'll see. Maybe on a weekday during the day when there are fewer people.

That's all for now. Returning the mislabeled 34C today, but that's it.

Filed under Bra sizing and fit

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