I Threw Out Every Underwire I Owned. I Should Have Done It Years Ago.

A note from a reader about the soft, seamless bra from a small Florida boutique that finally ended the digging, the red marks, and the daily dread of taking it off.

I am 61 years old, and for most of my adult life there has been a small, private moment of relief at the end of every single day, the moment I finally took my bra off.

I do not think I ever said that out loud to anyone until recently. It is not the sort of thing you bring up. But I suspect that if you are a woman somewhere near my age, you know exactly the moment I mean. You walk in the door, you put your bag down, and the first thing your hands do is reach behind your back.

For me it had gotten worse over the years, not better. The underwires dug in along the bottom. By two in the afternoon there was a dull ache under each side, and by evening there were two red lines pressed into my skin that stayed there long after the bra came off. The straps left grooves on my shoulders. I had started, without quite admitting it to myself, to plan my days around how long I could stand to keep the thing on.

I want to tell you what changed, because a friend of mine told me, and I am glad she did.

What it is

It is a soft, seamless bra called the FlexiBra. It comes from a small Florida boutique called Sanibel that I had never heard of until that same friend mentioned them at lunch, rather quietly, the way you mention something you are slightly embarrassed to be so enthusiastic about.

There is no underwire in it. None. The thing that had been digging into me for decades simply is not there. Instead it is one smooth, seamless piece that feels, and I am borrowing their words because they are the right ones, like a second skin.

The first afternoon I wore it I kept waiting for the ache to start. It did not start. I remember standing in my kitchen around three o'clock, a little suspicious, waiting for the familiar pinch under my arm, and it never came.

For the first time in years, I forgot I was wearing one at all.

The part nobody warns you about

Here is the thing nobody tells you, that after a certain age, the regular bras stop being merely uncomfortable and start being something you genuinely dread.

The skin is more delicate. The marks take longer to fade. A wire that you barely noticed at forty becomes a small daily ordeal at sixty. And the wide, smoothing band on this one does something I did not expect, it lies flat across the back instead of cutting in, so there is no roll of skin pushed up above it. Under a blouse, my back looks smooth in a way it has not in a long while.

The straps were the other surprise. They are soft and flexible and they sit without that pressure of a tight band sawing into the shoulder. No grooves at the end of the day. I checked, the way you check a bruise to see if it still hurts. Nothing.

The soft one, out where I can see it. The old wired ones are gone.

It still holds me up, which I had honestly stopped expecting from anything comfortable. There is a natural lift to it, gentle but real, and somehow it manages that without the bulk or the scaffolding I had assumed was the price of being held. Under a summer top it gives a smooth, clean line, no lumps, no straps showing.

→ Read about the FlexiBra

What I told Sarah

My daughter Sarah, who is thirty eight and lives in Boston, phoned me on a Sunday and somewhere in the conversation I mentioned, almost in passing, that I had finally found a bra that did not hurt.

There was a little pause. Then she said, "Mom, are you telling me you have been uncomfortable this whole time?"

And I realized, standing there in my kitchen with Buster, our little rescue terrier, asleep on my foot, that yes, I had been. For years. I had simply decided it was a normal part of getting dressed and stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a sound you have heard every day.

"I did not know it could be different," I told her. "That is the part that gets me."

She asked me to order her one too. I told her I already had three.

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 $37.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a comfortable wireless bra like this in the last few years.

• Wacoal wireless bra, $68
• Soma, $62
• Sanibel FlexiBra, $37.95

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

What I'd tell you if we were friends

If we were on my back porch with a glass of iced tea, and you had asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that women our age have quietly accepted being uncomfortable as the cost of being dressed, and we should not have. I would tell you to stop waiting for the moment at the end of the day when you finally get to take it off, and to find something you do not count down the hours to remove.

I would tell you the beige is the one I reach for under almost everything, and the black is the one I bought second because I knew I would want a spare in the wash. I would tell you to buy two, because the stack discount comes off when you do, and because once you have worn one you will not want to go back to the others sitting in your drawer.

I would tell you that the popular sizes are already showing as low. When I checked again this morning, a couple of the bands were flagged. The anniversary sale ends when the sizes do, and the comfortable ones always seem to go first.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been quietly reaching behind your back at the end of every day with relief, please do not wait.

While the sizes are still in stock.

— Barbara