Boobs
How I Learnt to Love my Small Breasts
Throwing away my bras gave me a whole new perspective
I was 15 when someone first suggested I get a breast augmentation. I was shopping for bras with my mum when she casually said:
“You know you can get a boob job on the NHS nowadays?”
You see, I have small breasts. Not B cups (I laugh when people say a B cup is “tiny”). Not even A cups really. It started off normally enough. Like many women, my breasts started growing when I was about nine. The problem is, they also stopped growing when I was about nine.
Maybe they knew before I did that I didn’t want kids. “Down tools lads, she’s not gonna use them anyway. Might as well call it a night.”
Nevertheless, I still wore bras, because that’s what you do, right? 32AA was my flavour, mainly because that’s the smallest size you can get in most lingerie shops (it’s always confused me that AA is smaller than an A, but a DD is bigger than a D. The system sets you up to fail, I swear.)
You couldn’t get pretty bras in smaller sizes at the time, so I lived in three grubby t-shirt bras: a white one, a black one, and a nude one. They were padded because all small bras were — you’re not supposed to settle for small breasts. You have to at least make them look bigger, so the advertising says.
I wore a Wonderbra precisely once and I learnt two things. Number one, those contraptions are not comfy. Number two, you actually need decent sized breasts in the first place for them to have any effect.
Much like zero multiplied by ten is still zero (don’t come at me maths bros), you cannot construct a cleavage from nothing. My poor little boobs were pushed up as high as they would go and they still didn’t so much peek out of the lowest-cut top I owned.
So I stuck with those same t-shirt bras for the next 10 years, except I lost the white one at some point, so I was just switching between the black and nude one for about 8 of them.
When bralettes became fashionable all of a sudden it was great — I didn’t need a bra anyway. Except, in the back of my mind I was still thinking of that old playground taunt:
“If you didn’t have feet would you wear shoes? No? Then why are you wearing a bra?”
Sure, bralettes are more comfortable than bras, but they’re still restrictive. You still can’t wear anything backless or strapless with them. And I don’t need to wear one.
So one day, I just stopped. I made a new year’s resolution to stop wearing any kind of chest support and it’s the only resolution I’ve ever kept. It also completely changed how I felt about my breasts.
I never actually hated my breasts. I wouldn’t have actually qualified for a free boob job on the NHS because the criteria involves a psychologist agreeing that the size of your breasts is having a deleterious effect on your mental health, and I was never there. I just really would have liked them to be bigger.
I can’t wear any item of clothing that has breast cups built in, because I won’t fill it out. Most strapless items I’ve had to return because it turned out your boobs were supposed to keep the thing up and if I wasn’t careful it would end up around my waist.
I viewed having small breasts largely as an inconvenience; although my ex saying “more than a handful’s a waste….shame you don’t even have a handful” was hurtful, I have to say.
But now it’s the opposite. I love my small boobs and I would never ever want them to be bigger. The reason? Not wearing bras is bloody great. I don’t mean to brag, I know some larger-chested people feel uncomfortable without a bra, but now I’ve tasted freedom in all its nipple-bearing glory I could never go back.
I’m soooo comfortable, all the time. I don’t have to faff around with strapless or backless bras to go with certain clothes. I have more money for not having to keep replacing bras (let’s pretend for argument’s sake I didn’t wear the same two bras for nigh-on a decade anyway). And I like how my clothes look better this way — bras always ruined the lines of things, or the straps got in the way.
Some people have looked at me aghast when I tell them I don’t even wear bras to work, but so far no one has been scandalised by it, to my knowledge.
“But what if your boss sees your nipples?!” someone once asked me. My boss is a 30-something, heterosexual man. I’m pretty confident he’s seen a woman’s nipples before. Also, the fact that people have nipples is, I would hope, common knowledge. If any of my colleagues were shocked by it, I’d have to wonder how they got their job in the first place.
It’s been a boon for the occasional modelling I do as well. There’s literally always an outfit in every show that is see-through or that you can’t wear a bra with for some reason. It is a statistical fact (probably).
A lot of the other models aren’t comfortable going braless, especially if they’re wearing something see-through, so I’ve leaned into the role of “the one that always gets her baps out”.
After all, as a show director once said to me “your boobs are so small it doesn’t really count as nudity for you, anyway”.
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