Brand Size Guides
How to read a brand’s own size chart, and what we publish before naming one.
Match your centimetres to the brand’s centimetres, not your letter to their letter. Nearly every brand publishes underbust and bust ranges alongside its size labels. Those ranges are the useful part of a brand chart. The letters are the part that varies.
Finding the chart that actually applies
- Use the brand’s own site, not a stockist’s. Stockists frequently republish outdated charts.
- Use the storefront for your region. The same brand often sells AU/UK labelling on one domain and US labelling on another, for physically identical garments.
- Check for a per-style chart. Many brands publish a general chart plus exceptions for particular ranges, and the exception is the one that matters.
- Note the date. A chart that has not been touched in years may not describe the current cut.
Reading the chart
- Find the measurement columns. Ignore the letters at first. Look for underbust and bust in centimetres or inches.
- Locate your underbust range. If you sit at the top of one range and the bottom of the next, note both.
- Locate your bust range in that row. That intersection is the brand’s recommended size.
- Compare it to your calculated size. If they differ by a step, that difference is the brand’s grading, and it is information worth keeping.
- Check the returns policy before ordering more than one size to try.
Signals that a brand runs small or large
- Review patterns. Consistent “size up” or “runs small” comments across many reviews of the same style are a real signal. A handful are not.
- Band ranges. If a brand assigns a 76–80 cm underbust to its size 12 where our chart assigns 73–77, its bands run loose.
- Cup sequence. A brand that jumps A, B, C, D, DD, DDD is using US naming even if its bands look Australian.
- Specialist ranges. Brands that grade past G usually cut deeper cups throughout, including at smaller sizes.
Our standard for publishing a brand guide
We do not publish a page about a brand until we can do it properly. Every brand guide we publish will carry:
- A direct link to the brand’s current official chart, and the regional storefront it applies to.
- The date the chart was reviewed, and who reviewed it.
- How the brand’s band and cup convention maps to the chart this site uses.
- Any observed exceptions, labelled honestly as official, tested by us, reported by readers or unknown.
- A correction link next to the review date.
We do not use brand logos, we do not scrape retailer charts, and brand names appear only to identify the brand being discussed. Guides publish once we have at least five properly researched brands – until then, this page is the honest version of what we know.
Spotted something out of date?
If a brand has changed its chart or our mapping is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and note the change. See the editorial and correction policy.