We all know that shopping for bras can be a terrifying experience, but, impossibly, it just got a little scarier.
While most advertisements for lingerie picture aspirational images of women with perfect bodies and sexy, supported curves -- think Victoria’s Secret or La Perla -- a Canadian lingerie shop is boldly showing the dark underside of what the wrong bra size can do to breasts.
Instead of softly-lit, provocative images designed to appeal to both sexes, these ads for The Boobie Trap, a bra boutique in St. John's, Newfoundland, look like something out of the "Blair Witch Project." Each ad in the campaign -- launched on October 31, according to Business Insider -- resembles a poster for a horror film. With titles such as "The Sagging" and taglines like "We can stop the horror," they identify movie monster-like archetypes for breasts in ill-fitting bras, such as the "quadraboob" and the dreaded "shelf boob."
According to Marketing, Advertising and PR in Canada, the ads for The Boobie Trap are newsworthy because they are the first lingerie ads to exclusively target the customers who will be wearing them -- women.
Jenny Smith, creative group head at Target Marketing Communications, the firm behind the ads, told the Canadian trade publication that she thinks women will connect with the campaign:
[Bad bras] result in a number of very horrible and grotesque and frightening malfunctions, so the idea of the campaign was to draw attention to that fact ... I think 85 or 90% of women actually wear the wrong bra size and they experience these malfunctions, and sometimes they don't know they're showing off these malfunctions.
It's not just Canadian women who aren't in touch with their bra size; A May 2011 survey by the UK shop Debehnhams found 85% of women do wear the wrong bra size, and Time magazine famously stated, "'Eighty percent of American women are wearing the wrong bra' is the 'more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married' statistic of the new millennium."
Oprah has tried to remedy the gap between women's breasts and the bras they buy with "bra interventions" and even "The Doctors" have gotten on the bra-fitting bandwagon.
But will the "frightening" images of lumpy and ill-fitting bras backfire and turn customers off? Or is this the most brilliant advertising campaign/PSA for lingerie yet?
PHOTOS/VIDEOS: Here are some highlights from the recent Boobie Trap Ad campaign:
