Printed swimsuits can potentially make certain body types appear larger or draw attention to flaws based on the effect of the print’s scale, colors, and placement as well as how much stretch the fabric contains. However, a printed bikini can also have a slimming illusion that makes you look smaller if the style flatters your individual physique with elements like flattering necklines, optical effects, and strategic color blocking. So it depends on picking the printed suit with the best pattern proportions and tailoring to complement your contours.
How Light Reflects Off Prints and Patterns
When considering how print and solid swimsuits interact with light, some basic principles of physics apply. Light hits a surface and then bounces off, creating a reflection. The amount and direction of reflected light depends on the texture, color, and intricacy of a pattern. Prints made up of contrasting colors and irregular shapes reflect light in more scattered directions. Solids and flatter fabrics create reflections bouncing uniformly.
This effect plays a role in visual perception and whether the eye sees entire areas as enlarged. Busy prints return more scattered light to the eye, emphasizing and advancing specific areas and contours.
For example, a swimsuit with big floral shapes can accentuate the curve and projection of hips by reflecting light in a more chaotic way off a three-dimensional surface area. By comparison, a solid swimsuit reflects light evenly off the same area, deemphasizing contours.
Reasons Why Printed Suits Might Make You Look Bigger
Contrasting Colors and Shading
Within printed designs themselves, the contrast of light and dark colors creates definition, outlining a shape. Think of a classic black and white zebra stripe and how it adds dimensionality and form to surfaces. Bright citrus colors like neon orange also advance, making certain areas stand out.
Prints using shaded color variations, differential hues, gradients, and thick bands of contrasting brightness levels essentially create an optical illusion that alters dimension perception. This can make some body parts and curves seemingly enlarge or project more prominently than they do in reality.
Figure Irregularities and Patterns
The human body contains all sorts of curves, dimples, veins, bumps and dimensional elements, especially when scantily clad in a swimsuit. When an irregular surface topology interacts with an intricate, high-contrast print, interesting visual effects occur.
For example, when a raised thigh vein, stretch mark, or bumpy cellulite patch sits under a striped or floral print swimsuit, it creates almost a moiré pattern, distorting the straight lines and uniform shapes. Light reflects off uneven surfaces at different angles, interrupting and bending print designs.
Areas with dimensional irregularities also protrude more visibly through busy prints because the colors and lines break around lumps and bumps. Solid suits conceal uneven topology better. Just as printing a document on wrinkly paper makes the creases stand out, texture and dimensionality become more obvious under patterns.
Print Placement and Quantity
With sizes, placement, and groupings of prints factoring into distorting effects, can patterns ever flatter? Do guides exist for maximizing slimming outcomes or balancing prints across an ensemble?
General recommendations for minimizing the bulking properties of prints include:
- Placing small-scale prints on areas you want to downplay and larger motifs on those you want to accentuate
- Creating color blocking visual breaks at strategic points to make zones seem condensed
- Using vertical and diagonal lines which slenderize more than horizontals
- Anchoring printed bottoms with solid color tops to centralize focus upwards
Mixing various patterns risks compounding unwanted dimensional effects. But placing small florals with medium geometrics or pens—for example, a petite dotted top with striped boy shorts—can balance out any bulking from the prints.
Wearing swimsuits where certain print layouts align with body contours also prevents shapes appearing chopped up or width-distorted. For instance, placing pinstripes or chevrons pointing toward center panels keeps the eyes tracking in a slimming direction.
Fabric Stretch and Structure
Beyond prints themselves, swimsuit fabric and construction plays a role in how body shapes appear. Stretch fabrics like Lycra spandex, common in swimwear, contour closely to the skin. This enables even tiny irregular lumps and indentations to transmit through a patterned overlay noticeably.
Yet stretch fabrics also compress and shape the body. Tighter fits counterintuitively don’t always mean less coverage or a larger looking figure. Control lining panels engineered into many structured swimsuits act like shapewear to smooth bulges and flatten the stomach. So in form-fitting stretch suits, prints might overlay a firmer compressed surface with fewer bumps and protuberances showing through.
Some suits even have uneven compression levels, with more stretch fabric over areas like the rear to avoid flattening curves while control panels trim in zones like the thighs. This allows stretch prints to emphasize assets while minimizing trouble spots for an optimally balanced look.
Of course, non-stretchy swimsuits have less give to conceal irregular bulges. A printed mesh racing or basketball-style suit will show more lumps and bumps reading through its flat graphic overlay. Stretch fabric swimsuits enable prints to distort dimension perception from any patterning effects too.
Do Prints Distort Proportion and Shape?
Another optical effect of prints comes from how the eye perceives the orientation of lines and boundaries between shapes and colors. Prints create false boundaries that can obscure where a curve really begins, ends, or turns. Bold graphics also break up continuous areas into disproportionate-appearing chunks.
For example, if a swimsuit contains large horizontal stripes, color blocking, or wide panels of varying prints, it cuts the body into segments versus showing it as one smooth, sweeping curve. This can make certain parts like the hips seem wider or legs appear shorter than their actual shape, similar to how contrasting dress patterns warp proportion perception.
Making some areas appear larger while abbreviating others allows prints to achieve both slimming and enlarging effects simultaneously. Wide stripes or large flowers might make the bust or rear look bigger. But stripes and color blocking could condense other zones like the waist or thighs.
Do Swimsuit Prints Actually Camouflage Flaws?
With all the potential optical slimming and enlarging effects covered so far, one might wonder if prints counterintuitively do hide flaws after all. There exists anecdotal belief that busy prints divert attention from trouble spots better than solid suits. Checks, florals, and watercolors could mask cellulite dimples, stretch marks, surgery scars, uneven skin tone, and other issues more effectively.
Research on this issue remains limited. But some studies analyzed visual search times with photoshopped images containing blemishes under various prints. While prints seemingly concealed flaws better than solids alone, people still located imperfections quickly under patterns. This held true even when the colors, contrast, and scale increased between prints and skin damage.
So rather than hiding flaws, prints merely bombard the eye with so much visual noise and mixing of colors that no single defect draws focus. But textures, shadows, discolorations, and skin topology still show through strongly despite prints overlaying them. The eye naturally gravitates toward contrast gradients, hue variations, and dimensional irregularities within a scene.
Finding Balance: Prints Can Flatter Within Limits
In conclusion, clearly no definitive guidelines exist dictating that busy prints universally make figures look bigger across all wearers, shapes, body issues, and style choices. But strong evidence supports that contrasting colors, certain motifs, layout alignments, and scale/mixing effects can visually enlarge, distort proportions, emphasize contours, and reveal flaws.
Nonetheless, prints don’t represent an automatic negative regarding swimwear appearance. Strategic patterning effects allow both slimming and curving outcomes simultaneously across different body zones. Visual slimming from stripes and color blocking counterbalance accentuation of assets from floral shapes and abstract watercolor prints.
