It’s so bad that my fiancée has some bras that say she’s a B cup and others that says she’s a D cup. In order to go bra shopping, you have to actually try them on to find out if they fit.
If I had to try on underwear to see if they fit, I might not bother with underwear at all!
I think underwire is more important the larger your breast volume is. I was recently at an event with a bunch of women who’ve known each other for a long time and we did a game where an emcee asked a question and then we went to a side of the room that fit our personal answer. One of them was 1) underwire, 2) no wire, 3) no bra. As I shuffled over to the underwire side, one of my pals joked that this was just a way to separate us by breast size. And sure enough, those of us with the wires tended to be on the heavier-cupped side, and the small number of no-bra ladies were quite petite.
I tried bralettes once and they didn’t work for me at all. I’m too big for them to provide any support so they just buckled, essentially. It’s a bummer because some of them are so cute! But my girls are just too heavy. And the only thing that keeps them in line is the damn wire. I will say that being fitted correctly does help the wire feel more comfortable though.
Oh believe me, I fully get that I have a bit of “small boob privilege” in terms of being able to wear bralettes. Do the non-bralette, non-underwire bras still not work for you though? They seem to provide a decent amount of support, but idk how they work for everyone.
They still buckle a bit unfortunately, unless they’re a full-on sports bra that is squashing them as hard as possible and giving me the monoboob look. I’ve also found that a properly fitted bra that has the wire for structure actually makes me look slimmer overall, probably because my band size is actually on the narrower side. So I’ll occasionally wear the one non-wire bra I have when I don’t care as much about it looking good under my clothes. But even then, when it buckles on the side, the bra still kind of sticks out under my arms so it’s still uncomfortable.