How to measure bust, waist, hips and high hip

Before you start

• Use a soft tape, the kind sold for sewing. A metal builder’s tape will not sit flat around a curve.
• Measure over underwear or thin, close-fitting clothes; thick fabric adds to every reading and adds unevenly.
• Stand normally with your weight on both feet and breathe out gently before reading the waist. Do not pull in.
• Keep the tape level all the way round — check the back in a mirror — and snug against the body without compressing it.
• Read each measurement twice. This site’s rule: if the two readings differ by more than a centimetre, take a third and use the middle value.

Bust

Around the fullest part of the bust, with the tape level across the back at the same height. Wear the bra you usually wear, or none; a heavily padded or minimising bra changes the number. In our ANSUR II stability analysis this was, under that procedure’s tie-break, the measurement that most often decided the result.

Waist

Around the narrowest part of the torso. If there is no obvious narrowest point, bend sideways: the crease that forms is at the natural waist; measure there, standing straight. Breathe out gently and read. Note that this is the shape rules’ waist. The waist-to-hip percentile compares against NHANES, which measures the waist just above the top of the hip bone under a fixed protocol; for many people that is a different, often larger, circumference, so the percentile is a rough placement rather than an exact comparison.

Hips

Around the fullest part of the buttocks, feet together, tape level. This is usually lower than people expect — not at the hip bone, but at the widest point when seen from the side. Check in a mirror that the tape has not risen at the back.

High hip

Around the upper hip, below the waist and above the fullest part of the hips. FFIT’s 2020 paper does not specify the landmark; this site’s convention is about 3 inches (7–8 cm) below the natural waist, tape level. You only need it when the calculator asks, which happens when no earlier rule has matched and your first three numbers satisfy the other conditions of Spoon or Bottom Hourglass; the ratio of high hip to waist, with 1.193 as the dividing value, then decides. In our ANSUR II analysis 34.7% of records needed it; that is a figure about that experiment.

How much does precision matter?

The rules are thresholds. In our ANSUR II analysis of 1,297 women whose result did not need a high hip, the median single-measurement change that altered the result was 2.5 cm; 42.8% were within 2 cm and 23.8% within 1 cm. So if your result shows a boundary note, the useful next step is to re-measure the named circumference.

Inches or centimetres?

Either. The published thresholds are in inches; centimetre inputs are converted before comparison and the result shows both. What matters is that all your measurements are in the same unit and that you have selected it.

References

The rules and figures on this page come from the sources below. Reference values are conventions from the literature, not targets.

1. Simmons, Istook & Devarajan (2004). Female Figure Identification Technique (FFIT) for Apparel, Part I: Describing Female ShapesJournal of Textile and Apparel, Technology and Management 4(1):1–16 · JTATM 4(1)Defines the nine FFIT shapes (hourglass, top and bottom hourglass, spoon, triangle, inverted triangle, rectangle, diamond, oval) from bust, waist, high-hip and hip circumferences on 3D body scans of North American women. The rules on this site are this set, as later revised.