Hugs for Your Jugs

This is Part 3 of my Bra Physics series. In Part 1 , I described the forces involved in supporting your breasts and what parts of a bra are responsible for providing those forces. In Part 2 I introduced the concepts of stress and strain, and applied these and part 1's principles to the design and fit of bands. Now let's move on to the much maligned underwire (and the cradle). In the original Bra Physics post , I didn't talk much about the role of the underwire. The wires are a critical part of the "foundation" of a wired bra, as improper design or fit can cause pain and even injury, as well as reduce the support available in a bra. The underwire's main job is to resist the forces of the band, maintaining a cupped shape despite the bra being under high degrees of tension. Because the underwire is being pulled on by the band, we need to recap the stress and strain concepts discussed in Part 2 . Recap: Stress and Strain The strain of an item is essentially

I have a series of posts about the physics behind supportive bras . In the first post, I described that the band should make up most of the support system of a bra - but this doesn't mean the straps are not important. The best way to boil that post down is that the band provides support to the breasts but the straps maintain the shape of the cups by providing a key anchor point for the upper part of the cups. This post could be considered an additional part of that series, and for that reason an extended edition can be found on my Ko-fi . Don't worry, the main Bra Physics series hasn't been abandoned - I just wanted to get this one out first. The straps transmit a vertical tension force into your bra cup, and changing exactly where those forces travel can have major fit implications. This force transmission is very important in larger cup sizes where a bra is designed to be more supportive, so the ideas in this post will apply to a lesser degree for small or medium cup siz