My Story
I was eight years old when I started developing boobs. I vividly remember waking up one morning in third grade, and my chest felt sore. I felt around and realized there was a weird lump under what would soon become breast tissue. I called my dad into my room, sobbing my eyes out, telling him I had breast cancer and had to go to the hospital right away. He finished getting ready for work and brought me to my grandmother’s house, and she explained that this was the very beginning of womanhood. Pretty soon after, my mom bought me my first few training bras. At the time, I felt so adult for wearing bras to school under my t-shirts and tank tops. Little did I know, ten years later, I’d be writing about my experience of ditching bras for good.Â
It may not be surprising when I say it was in the summer of 2020 that I stopped wearing bras. It was still the quarantine era, and I rarely left the house, so I would throw my outfits together, not thinking twice about how my boobs looked. However, as Covid guidelines started to let up, wearing a bra was not even close to the first thing on my agenda. It was definitely weird at first, I can’t lie. I constantly felt like my girls were out there for everyone to see, which I now realize was ridiculous. I had to get used to how it felt to run with absolutely no support, but it never deterred me. Freeing the nip has been the most confidence-boosting thing I have ever done.Â
How It Has Benefitted Me As An Individual
- I’ve learned to love them
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Up until I stopped wearing bras, it regularly upset me that my girls would sit pretty with support and look entirely different without it. Ever since I ditched the support, I’ve realized they sit pretty anyway!! Every woman’s breasts are different and that’s what is so beautiful about them. Bras make them all look relatively uniform when they don’t need to be. I’ve come to appreciate how my boobs look in any shirt on any given day just because they’re mine.Â
- I’m always comfortable
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You always hear women talk about how taking their bra off at the end of the day is the best feeling. But what if you never needed to wear one in the first place? My girls never feel restricted or bound up by wired bras anymore. Even in tight shirts, they can sit how they want to. The biggest bonus is never feeling scratchy tags or metal clips jabbing into my back or side.Â
- I’ve saved so much money
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Let’s be real, bras are expensive, and they aren’t even necessary. I used to have a bra for every occasion, from bombshell to strapless, to a few standard t-shirt bras. I might as well have been funding Victoria’s Secret fashion shows with the amount of money I’d spend. Now I can avoid spending on bras that nobody would see anyway and instead put that money towards clothes that people will actually see.Â
How Research Says You Can Benefit
- Going braless can strengthen your breast tissue AND make them perkier
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Underneath your breast tissue, there’s muscle, and when you free the nip, your muscles will grow to provide the support that your bra once did. When you give the muscle a reason to develop (aka not wearing bras), it actually makes your breasts sit higher up compared to them when using artificial support.Â
- Less back, neck, and shoulder pain
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It’s difficult to find a perfect-fitting bra. Whether the straps don’t fit right or the back doesn’t have the right sized clip, there are a lot of things that can make a bra not feel perfect. The issue is when a bra doesn’t fit perfectly, it can cause a lot of strain on your back, shoulder, and neck muscles. Going braless can potentially solve a lot of tension in these areas of muscle and allow them to develop to support your body naturally.
- Clearer skin
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Now this one may sound wild, but think about how much sweat and dirt a bra may hold. Unless you wash your bra after every wear or have one for each day of the week (which just is not realistic), these things will simply build up and be in constant contact with your skin. This is not to say that bras are dirty; they are absolutely not, but not having them on all the time nearly, just six inches away from your face, will improve your circulation and give your upper body a chance to breathe.Â
There is nothing wrong with wearing bras. If it makes you comfortable, then that’s what matters most. However, if you’ve been on the fence about freeing the nip, this is your sign to try it out. It’s a beautiful thing that we live in a time where our girls can dress however we see fit. So try it out, or don’t, whatever makes you happy.Â