One of the last attempts using science came from the University of Franche-Comte in Besançon, France. In 2013 sports science professor Jean-Denis Rouillion released his 15-year study of the effect of bras on 330 women between the ages of 18 and 35 in the media. As he commented in different interviews, the use of this garment from an early age does not help at all in what is to support the chest , reduce back pain or prevent the dreaded premature sagging of the breasts. Moreover, armed with gauges and squares, he dedicated himself to taking measurements on the breasts of these women and discovered that those who did not wear a bra had their nipples 7 mm higher than those of those women who used a continuous bra.
Does the bra reduce the overall tone of the female breast ? Of course! Says a well-known New York plastic surgeon, Stafford Broumand “In young women, not wearing a bra increases the production of collagen, which is very good for a developing breast.”
A cynical observer would say that this anti-bra tyranny could not come from a country other than France, the homeland of the rebellion against the bra. But turning to the scientific field, what is most striking is that Rouillion, after three years, has not yet published the results of his research , at least in a recognized journal in the world of health and listed in PubMed. In fact, if after a decade and a half the results he announced were only “preliminary”, as he confessed, it is already a joke. Of course, what it served was to rekindle the anti-bra flame of the 70s and provoke heated discussions on social networks.
What the French researcher did not seem to consider is that women do not wear bras for medical or physiological reasons but for aesthetic and practical reasons . As an English journalist put it, “This researcher doesn’t realize that with a bra you rarely have to think about where your nipples are.” And not only that, but it prevents the breasts from swaying from side to side “if we didn’t have to grab them every time we run to get to the elevator.”
What does sound much more scientific is the work carried out by Joanna Scurr, an expert in breast biomechanics (there that is). Professor Scurr heads the chest health research group at the University in Portsmouth and her work – this time, published – does affect an important problem in women when they play sports: the chest moves an average of 21 cm up and down and side to side. The downside is that most bras are designed only to limit movement vertically, not horizontally. Moreover, according to this research group in daily life a significant number of women do not buy the ideal bra size : “many women do not want to show that their breasts are too small or too large, and they buy a bra that is not their size ”Says one of the group’s researchers, Wendy Hedger.
