Wearing clothes featuring vertical stripes may make you look taller and slimmer than you actually are, a new study submitted to a amateur scientist hunt has found.
Val Watham submitted the research to Radio 4's "So You Want to Be a Scientist?" hunt. Watham revealed that she became interested in the topic after reading about a previous study conducted by Dr Peter Thompson who found that horizontal stripes made you look slimmer. However Watham was skeptical about the finding as it used 2D images of women wearing vertical and horizontal striped dresses.
Instead Watham claimed that wearing clothes with horizontal stripes made you look wider while a simple black colored dress was most effective in making you look slimmer. Dr Thompson, who mentored Watham for the research, said that one of the reasons why horizontal stripes made you look wider could be because they revealed contours more strongly.
"Val has got a really interesting result that needs an explanation, as we don't really know what's going on. It may be something to do with the way stripes show up contours, and that horizontal stripes reveal contours more strongly than verticals, making people look wider", he said.