If you’re one of those women who firmly believe that ‘Home is where the bra comes off’, and you spend as little time as possible with your breasts pushed in and up, then there is some good news for you today.

The findings of a fifteen year long study into women’s breasts have been published this week and they suggest that, in contrast with long-held beliefs, women who wear bras have saggier breasts than women who don’t.

Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon, a sports medicine specialist from Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Besancon in Besancon, France, was behind the study, and spoke this week to France Info about the findings, saying: "Our first results confirm the hypothesis that the bra is a false need. Medically, physiologically, anatomically, the breast does not benefit from being deprived of gravity. Instead, it languishes with a bra."

Volunteers who skipped wearing a bra had perkier breasts at the end of the study...

Over three hundred volunteers participated in the study, with ages ranging from 18 to 35. Breasts were measured regularly over the fifteen-year period using a slide ruler and a caliper with all changes recorded.

The result? Women who did not wear bras had a 7 millimeter lift as measured from their nipples each year, had firmer breasts, and less prominent stretch marks.

Researchers have suggested that wearing bras prevented the growth of breast tissue, which lead to deterioration of the muscles that support the breasts. The muscles were not worked as hard in the case of those women who always wore bras. Further, there was no evidence to support beliefs that a bra would alleviate back pain in women who had large breasts.