Mesuring criterion for breasts size

Personally, I judge medium breasts by whether I can fit a full breast in one hand, so I tend to add medium breasts to the breast size that fits in one hand. Yeah, it's completely subjective. Maybe my hand size is pretty standard, so I haven't gotten any complaints about the tagging yet.
Anyway, what is the objective criterion?

One day I looked at the wiki and it said.

The breast's volume is less than the volume of a sphere with the same diameter as the character's facial area.

Facial area??? That was the first time I realized the world used facial area to measure breasts size. Have I been living on Earth-4 all this time?

No, I'm not being sarcastic, I'm serious. When you walk into an underwear store to buy a bra for your girlfriend or yourself, does the clerk take a tape measure and measure her/your head size? They measure your band size just below your breasts first and then your breasts size. Is there even one post in the bust measuring tag that measures head size?
post #2688500 and its child teach us how we should measure breast size.

Go discuss definitions in the forums then. If you convince enough people that a change in breast size definitions is necessary then I'll be happy to follow.

Yeah, come here. This topic was created for you @Billyaabob.
Leave a comment.

What do you judge to be the range of cup sizes for small breasts, medium breasts, large breasts, and huge breasts?

If I remember correctly every country uses different cup size measuring systems so you would need to use numbers to describe the breasts. If so, how will you scale the measuring system of cups up/down to fit girls the size of giants or as small as fairies?

The wiki also mentions post #2168938.

Head size/facial area is just a quick and easy way to estimate breast size that works most of the time, since you probably won't be applying a tape measure to anime pictures. It's not perfect, though. Head size compared to the rest of the body varies, and I doubt many people would tag post #6195643 as medium_breasts.

I'm pretty sure that the standards used by Danbooru for breast size come in fact from VNDB, which uses the exact same wording for their tags ("protagonist with X breasts" tags).
Facial area is a bit awkward because very often is about the same as total head size. huge breasts should be a deal bigger than that.

BaiserLaVerite said:

I'm pretty sure that the standards used by Danbooru for breast size come in fact from VNDB, which uses the exact same wording for their tags ("protagonist with X breasts" tags).

Not likely, their tags are listed as having been created 4 years ago. Danbooru's huge and gigantic breasts tags' size definitions were set around 16 and 14 years ago respectively. Flat chest is similarly old. Small breasts were defined about 11 years ago. Medium was defined almost 8 years ago, and large's current definition over 7 years ago. Obviously there is more difficulty in defining the differences in between the extremes.

BaiserLaVerite said:

Facial area is a bit awkward because very often is about the same as total head size. huge breasts should be a deal bigger than that.

Huge breasts is currently defined as bigger than the head. I do agree large breasts is annoying to use when the face takes up the entire head though. (Is the forehead included in that face?)

GreyOmega said:

Not likely, their tags are listed as having been created 4 years ago. Danbooru's huge and gigantic breasts tags' size definitions were set around 16 and 14 years ago respectively. Flat chest is similarly old. Small breasts were defined about 11 years ago. Medium was defined almost 8 years ago, and large's current definition over 7 years ago. Obviously there is more difficulty in defining the differences in between the extremes.

The history says "Automated import from when the tag database did not keep track of change histories". I certainly remember reading those definitions on VNDB well over 4 years ago.

According to archive.org:

• VNDB's g533, "Big Breasts Size Heroine", was first mirrored on 7 Sep 2014, when it was titled "Kyonyuu Heroine" and defined as "One ore more heroine's chest size is very big (bigger than 90cm)." The Internet Archive captured it several more times between 2014-2020, but this definition was unchanged until mid-2020 except for fixing the spelling of "or".
• You can also see from the "Heroines Body" meta tag that in 2014, VNDB only had "Kyonyuu Heroine" and "Pettanko Heroine".
• g3204, "Heroine with Big Breasts", was first mirrored on 2 Dec 2020 and had basically the same definition as it does currently.
• g3183, "Heroine with Huge Breasts", was first mirrored on 28 Nov 2020 and had basically the same definition as it does currently.
• g3184, "Heroine with Gigantic Breasts", was first mirrored on 21 January 2021 and had basically the same definition as it does currently.

So unless the IA did something weird where it only mirrored g533 but not other tags, those VNDB child tags are indeed only 4 years old.

Billyaabob said:

What do you judge to be the range of cup sizes for small breasts, medium breasts, large breasts, and huge breasts?

When I mention bra cup size, I’m talking about "what measurements do you need to measure someone’s breasts", not "how many cups are small or large", which is completely nonsensical.

This is because, as you said, different countries have different standards and different ways of calculating, and someone might think B is medium enough, and someone else might think H is still small.

But what to measure, not how to calculate the size, is the same in every country I know of.

And if we use head size to measure breast size, there are so many things we can't explain.
Some oppai lolis do not qualify in head-bust measuring, and are chibi characters always small-medium breasts?
And if they're turned around and their breasts are sticking out the side of their torso(ex. backboob), what are we going to use to say large breasts?
I'm sure there are more.

AkaringoP said:

And if we use head size to measure breast size, there are so many things we can't explain.
Some oppai lolis do not qualify in head-bust measuring, and are chibi characters always small-medium breasts?
And if they're turned around and their breasts are sticking out the side of their torso(ex. backboob), what are we going to use to say large breasts?
I'm sure there are more.

As was sort of implied before by Nonesovile, we don't have to use the actual head size of chibi or deformed characters. Just imagine how big their heads would be if they were proportional and use those as references instead.

The current wikis are decent enough guidelines, but we probably don't need to treat them as gospel. Most users are definitely not doing volume comparisons when using these tags, they're just eyeballing it, and cases like this where there's a strong disagreement on which tag to use don't seem to be very common, so eyeballing it seems to work fine the majority of the time. I don't think this needs to be as big of a fuss as we're making it.

7HS said:

According to archive.org:

...

So unless the IA did something weird where it only mirrored g533 but not other tags, those VNDB child tags are indeed only 4 years old.

Breast size tags on VNDB were created more than 4 years ago. Most of them were introduced in 2016 and the remaining ones in 2019, if I remember correctly. The definitions were changed several times over the years, but the current version should also be from around 2019.
But it is true that the definitions themselves came from Danbooru.

blindVigil said:

The current wikis are decent enough guidelines, but we probably don't need to treat them as gospel. Most users are definitely not doing volume comparisons when using these tags, they're just eyeballing it, and cases like this where there's a strong disagreement on which tag to use don't seem to be very common, so eyeballing it seems to work fine the majority of the time. I don't think this needs to be as big of a fuss as we're making it.

Agree. I just think that it should be acceptable to add more than one breast size tag for the same pair of breasts if their size is borderline. That's what some people already do with various color tags.

Blank_User said:

As was sort of implied before by Nonesovile, we don't have to use the actual head size of chibi or deformed characters. Just imagine how big their heads would be if they were proportional and use those as references instead.

deformed and chibi are generally big-headed, so how can we determine the original head size of them? Can't it be judged within the frame without other references? Eventually, we should be able to measure breasts size regardless of head size.

AkaringoP said:

deformed and chibi are generally big-headed, so how can we determine the original head size of them? Can't it be judged within the frame without other references? Eventually, we should be able to measure breasts size regardless of head size.

Like I said, use your imagination. If you need a visual aid, just look at any post of a character with realistic proportions. By doing this, it shouldn't matter whether the head is disproportionally large or out of frame.

I don't know why head size was chosen as the measuring method, but it makes sense to me. It's easier to compare similar shapes, for one thing. They also tend to be the same size relative to the bodies for non-stylized characters, so it can be used to get an idea of how big the character's body is. The factor that would vary the most is breast size, and since head/body size ratios are consistent, the head can be used as a proxy for the body. With practice, users shouldn't even need to think about the head; they'll have an intuitive sense of how large breasts differ from medium breasts on the same body type.

If we were to use a more direct metric such as chest size, we'd have to design it in such a way to be consistent with our current system so as not to require a bunch of tag gardening, but you'd have to show that enough users are inconvienenced by the current system first in order to actually change things.

MyrMindservant said:

That's what some people already do with various color tags.

I sure hope people aren't doing that because for single-colored *thing* I can't imagine a reasonable reason to do that. Similarly, color request is gone because if you can't tell colors you probably shouldn't be tagging anyway.

blindVigil said:

The current wikis are decent enough guidelines, but we probably don't need to treat them as gospel. Most users are definitely not doing volume comparisons when using these tags, they're just eyeballing it, and cases like this where there's a strong disagreement on which tag to use don't seem to be very common, so eyeballing it seems to work fine the majority of the time. I don't think this needs to be as big of a fuss as we're making it.

I agree, as guidelines they're fine, and just like many of the guidelines in our wikis, when you start applying them with absolutism you're doing it wrong. Nobody is supposed to actually measure these things, they are meant to be eyeballed. When one person says "medium by definition" and the rest says "looks large", they should be considered large, since that's what people see in them.

Blank_User said:

use your imagination. If you need a visual aid, just look at any post of a character with realistic proportions

You said to use our imagination or look at posts with realistic proportions, but aren't deformed and chibi already out of realistic proportions? We have to judge by what we see in the frame. If each person judged them in the realistic proportions they transformed they deserved, we'd be looking at about 1.77 million opinions.

AkaringoP said:

You said to use our imagination or look at posts with realistic proportions, but aren't deformed and chibi already out of realistic proportions? We have to judge by what we see in the frame. If each person judged them in the realistic proportions they transformed they deserved, we'd be looking at about 1.77 million opinions.

The comparisons with head sizes (which, as others pointed out, are a guideline, not an absolute rule) are understood to be in reference to those with realistic or close-to-realistic proportions (as in shoulder width about 2 to 3 times the head width such as post #7459324 or post #7124597. If there are users getting hung up over the breast size of chibi characters because they don't understand the spirit of the guidelines, we could always make the implicit part explicit.

MyrMindservant said:

Agree. I just think that it should be acceptable to add more than one breast size tag for the same pair of breasts if their size is borderline. That's what some people already do with various color tags.

No comment on the rest of the thread yet, but I've never understood why people do this. It's unacceptable tagging, in my opinion. Things like breast sizes and colors are objective, they're one or another. Differences in tagging might arise from differences in opinion, but that doesn't mean a single girl can have variably sized breasts; the notion looks both ridiculous on paper and on us as taggers. If it looks contestable just bucket it into the higher size, instead of padding and muddying two tags at once.

Someone will probably come along, disagree, and edit one of the sizes, but they're much less likely to notice and fix both which means posts double tagged on upload will remain that way, and be functionally Schrödinger's Breasts forever.