Plastic surgeons often use a variety of methods for patients to estimate the size of their new breasts after breast augmentation.  There are a variety breast implant sizers available to patients to use prior to receiving breast implants.
 
Breast Implant Sizers:  The Rice Bag

Over the years, one of the most common methods has been the "Rice Bag Test."  Using this method, you measure a volume of rice incubic centimeters comparable to that of breast implants.  You fill a plastic bag with the rice and stuff the bag in a sports bra to approximate the new breast size.
 
This method is like a thumbnail sketch.  You can easily do this in your home, stand in front of your mirror and check out the approximate size.
 
When researchers at L.W. Gatz tried this method, we noticed some things immediately:
 
*  Plastic bags are square.  No matter how hard we tried, it was difficult to fill a round bra cup with a square bag of rice!
*  Wearing this for any period of time, our researchers started to smell like cooked rice.
*  After an hour or two the bag caused an irritant to the skin.
 
Breast Implant Sizers:  The Water Bag
 
Another trick has been to fill a baggie with water.  This is known as the "water baggie" method.  Take a plastic bag and put it into a bra cup.  Fill the bag with water to your desired breast size.  Once you find the size you want, you pour out the bag into a measuring cup.  Let your doctor know how many cc's were in the cup. As you can imagine, this method is very difficult to control and very imprecise in determining your optimal size.

 
Breast Implant Sizers:  The Purlz™ Breast Sizing System
  
Earlier methods described above result in over 33% of all breast augmentation revisions to be for the change of breast implant size alone. After trying and rejecting these methods, we developed the Purlz™ Breast Sizing System.  This system is comfortable, durable, and easy to use, . But most importantly, it gives you and your doctor a very precise idea of the results you truly want from your breast augmentation procedure!

The Purlz™ Breast Sizing System was designed to help you choose your optimal breast size at your leisure and over an extended period of time. By wearing several different Purlz™ sizes, with a wide variety of garments and activities, the optimal choice will become very clear to you. Then wearing this size to your final consultation with your doctor prior to surgery, you will give him or her an exact sense of what you truly want from your procedure.