The weather has definitely taken a little bit of a less than summery turn at the moment and ruined the run of sunshine that we’d been having, and since I’ve still got the holiday blues since returning from Florida, today I’m bringing you a swimwear review! It’s definitely not warm enough to be wearing this right now, but somehow, magically during my yoga retreat, it was actually warm, despite being during April. Okay, I wasn’t exactly outside wearing this bikini, but I did wear it to the spa and underneath my wetsuit on the lake one day – and doing pretty strenuous yoga and SUP in the sun we had that day, I actually could have been wearing just the bikini!
I always find swimwear a struggle – being a 28GG, I usually tend to go for bra sized bikinis and swimsuits, but because of that, I’m starting to develop something of a grudge against them! There are definitely a lot more options out there for bra sized swimwear than there used to be, and they are a lot prettier than they used to be too, but I still sometimes just want to wear a simple triangle bikini. It feels like bra sized swimwear is based all around the construction quite a lot of the time and they just look like, well, bras to me! I even have some that have hook and eye fastenings – they’re pretty much just bras with swimwear fabric covering them, and that’s great for more swimming and more strenuous activities (I guess SUP probably comes into that actually…), but I want to look like everyone else on the beach too sometimes!
So when I was offered a bikini by UK Swimwear, I decided to go for one that was a lot more fun and a lot less bra, and the Phax Tropicana Sunset Triangle Bikini looked perfect to me!
I chose it in a size 12 and while it’s not the perfect fit (hello cleavage!) and I had to make a couple of adjustments to get a fit that wasn’t exposing everything, I love it! It’s super colourful, it isn’t halter neck (which can put a lot of strain on the neck for me with the weight since bikini bands aren’t very supportive in general!) and it has a “tropical” design. The adjustments I mentioned were simply removing the cross-straps at the cups – while I love these in the original design and would have kept them if I could, unfortunately they pulled the cups too close together in the centre so I wasn’t getting any side coverage at all. If I’d gone up in size to get more cup space, I would have had way too much in the straps and band, but removing these straps made it work so much better for me.
The bikini bottoms have a lovely extra detail too of the strapping on the hips. It’s only a small extra something, but it makes it so much more interesting than a plain pair of matching briefs, and I don’t think the strap and harness trend is going away anywhere any time soon in swimwear.
I also took the bikini with me to Florida as well as on my yoga retreat, and I have to say, it worked a lot better in the Florida sunshine and surroundings than it did in Whitby! I definitely felt a lot more awesome wearing a “normal” bikini instead of my usual bra sized ones that I often feel have too much coverage in the heat.
The only problem now is that I really want to book another holiday in the sun so I can get more wear out this bikini!
Gorgeous bikini and you look amazing!! The bikini top issue is a hard one, I keep being tempted to draft one, it can’t be too hard (can it?) but with chilly weather and no holiday booked it’s definitely on the back burner!!