I Threw Out Every Underwire I Owned, And I Have Never Slept Better In My Own Skin.

A note from a reader about the soft seamless bra from a small Devon boutique that ended the digging, the red marks, and the daily dread of the afternoon.

I am 61 years old, and three weeks ago I sat on the edge of my bed at four in the afternoon and took off a bra that had been digging into me since breakfast, and I felt the two red welts it had left under my ribs, and I thought, that is enough. I am done.

I want to tell another woman my age about this, because I do not think we talk about it, and I think we should.

For most of my adult life, taking off my bra at the end of the day was the single best moment of it. That is a strange thing to admit, but if you are a woman of a certain age I suspect you know exactly what I mean. By the afternoon the underwire would be digging into me. There would be a sore line where the band sat, and two little pink grooves on my shoulders where the straps had been pulling all day. By teatime I would be counting the hours until I could take the thing off.

And the worst part was the dread. The quiet, low dread of putting one on in the morning, knowing how the day would end.

I had told myself this was simply what a body my age had to put up with. That comfort was a thing you traded away somewhere around your fifties and did not get back. I was wrong about that, and I am almost annoyed about how long it took me to find out.

What it is

It is called the FlexiBra. It comes from a small coastal boutique in Devon called Torquay Boutique that I had never heard of until a neighbour of mine mentioned it over the fence.

It is a seamless bra. No underwire. None. There is no hard wire to dig into your ribs, and there are no seams to leave their cross-stitched print on your skin by the afternoon. The fabric is soft against you the whole way round, the way the inside of a good jumper is soft, and it simply sits there and does its job without ever once reminding you it exists.

The band is wide and it stays put. That wide band is the part I did not expect to love. It smooths everything across the back instead of cutting a line into it, so there is no roll of skin pushed up over the top the way there always was with my old ones. It gives a natural lift and a real bit of support, and it does all of that without any of the bulk or the architecture I had come to assume support required.

The soft one, folded on top of the pile now. The old wired ones are gone.

There is no four o'clock anymore. There is no welt to find when I take it off, because there is nothing digging in to leave one.

Emma rang me

After about a week of this my daughter Emma, who is thirty four and lives in London, rang me, and partway through the call she said, "Mum, you sound different. Lighter. What is going on with you?"

I told her I had thrown out every underwire I owned.

There was a pause. Then she laughed and said, "you did what?"

I told her I had bought a soft seamless one with no wire, that I had worn it every day for a week, and that I had genuinely forgotten, for whole afternoons at a time, that I was wearing a bra at all. I told her that on the Wednesday I had knelt in the garden in the soil with the tomato plants for two hours and not thought about it once.

She went quiet for a second. Then she asked me to send her the link. She is thirty four and she ordered one in the black that same evening.

"I will be honest, Mum," she said a fortnight later. "I did not know a bra could just feel like nothing. I have stopped taking mine off the second I walk through the door."

→ Read about the FlexiBra

What changed in three weeks

I had not been looking for a revelation. I had been looking, if anything, for nothing. I just wanted to stop noticing.

Three things I wrote down in the first week, because I knew I would want to remember them.

1. It does not dig. There is no wire, so there is nothing hard pressing into the soft part under your ribs hour after hour. I keep waiting for the afternoon ache to arrive and it simply does not.

2. It does not leave a mark. The seamless fabric and the wide band mean that when I take it off at night there are no grooves, no welts, no angry pink lines. My skin is just my skin.

3. It does not get hot. The fabric breathes. On a warm day, pottering about the house or out walking Poppy our little rescue terrier, I do not get that damp, stuck feeling I used to dread in the summer. It stays cool and it stays dry.

I have worn it on the ordinary days and the special ones both. To a long lunch with my sister where I almost wore something more structured underneath and then thought, no, why would I. To my granddaughter Lily's swimming lesson, in the soft folding chair beside the pool, for the better part of a morning. Around the house on the most ordinary Tuesday there is. And every time, the same small quiet relief.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me from ordering. The FlexiBra for £27.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of tea in the garden and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a comfortable wireless bra like this in the last few years.

• M&S wireless bra, £35
• Sloggi, £32
• Torquay FlexiBra, £27.95

And underneath, in slightly larger letters, the only thing I could think to write. …how??

What I would tell you if we were friends

If we were in my garden with a cup of tea, and you had asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that we have all been quietly putting up with something that we did not have to put up with. That the soreness and the welts and the four o'clock dread are not the price of being a woman over fifty. They are just the price of a wire and a hard seam, and you can simply stop paying it.

I would tell you that the beige is the one I wear the most, that the black is the one Emma swears by, and that I bought a soft pink one too, just because. I would tell you to buy two. If you buy two the stack discount comes off, and if you do what I did, you will end up reaching for one of them every single morning anyway and wishing you had a clean spare.

I would tell you that the popular sizes are already showing as nearly gone. The larger sizes in black and beige were both flagged as low when I checked again this morning. The anniversary sale ends when the sizes do.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been counting down the hours each afternoon until you can take the thing off, please do not wait.

While the sizes are still in stock.

— Susan