An underwear brand has created bras for 12-year-olds that promise to hide 'imperfections'

Instead of supporting 12-year-olds through the whole 'transition-into-adolescence' thing, the lingerie company has decided to make them feel even more insecure about it, instead

It’s really hard being 12 years old. There’s the fact that your parents don’t understand you, and the fact that your teachers don’t understand you, and the fact that your friends don’t understand you either. There’s the issue that you’re too old to do everything you used to do, but not old enough to do anything that you want to. And then there’s the whole changing-body-and-bleeding-once-a-month-or-twice-a-month hormones thing.

In other words, 12-year-olds have enough to deal with, without being told that their bodies are ‘imperfect’ and need to start adhering to a set of vague-and-unrealistic expectations of beauty.

But when Florence Braud, from Bretagne, went shopping with her daughter last week in France, she stumbled across a padded bra that was on sale in the kids section – promising to erase imperfections in 12-year-olds’ bodies.

She took to Twitter to share her disappointment at the French lingerie brand – tweeting ‘Erase imperfections’ and ‘smooth out the shape’, says a bra in 70A [the smallest bra size in France] in a kids section… #We’reReallyNotDoneWithThisShit.’

Since posting the tweet, it’s been shared hundreds of times – as others started contacting the French brand, tweeting ‘Hello @DIMparis. So according to you, 12-year-old girls have “imperfections” that should be smoothed out?’ and ‘How awful! Bras for little girls, to make their chests bigger and “erase imperfections”! #WTF #DIM’

Florence said that she’d only gone shopping with her daughter for a bra in the first place after another girl in her class had made fun of her for not wearing one – which just serves to emphasise our earlier point about how awful it is being 12-years-old.

‘It saddened me to see that, so soon, she was already suffering the threats [of] femininity,” Florence said in an interview with Buzzfeed, before deeming it an 'injunction of femininity'.

A spokesperson for the brand – which is hilariously called Dim – responded to the outrage with the following statement: ‘When we said imperfections, we meant clothing and non-physiological imperfections. This is to erase imperfections materials — folds, overlays, etc. — to make the product smooth and harmonious under clothing.’

We’re not convinced.