by claire coshan

Created on: July 08, 2010

One of the body parts that women are most self conscious about is their upper arms, a survey of British women showed that they would rather bare their legs than their arms on the beach.

The upper arm is an incredibly difficult place to lose weight from and to tone up, but you can make this troublesome area look much smaller by making some simple, clever adjustments to your wardrobe.

Sleeveless tops:

Trade your sleeveless tops in for some short sleeved ones, if you have arms that are slightly on the larger side, then sleeveless tops will not do you any favours, they will only succeed in making your arms look bigger. Buy yourself some short sleeved tops, but make sure that they sleeves are too bog for your arms, this will create the illusion that your arms are just too small to fill the sleeves.

Puff cap sleeves work in much the same way, making the arm and shoulders appear thinner.

Long sleeve tops:

Many people make the mistake of thinking that by simply covering up the arm, they make it look thinner, when in fact, the opposite is true, tight fitting sleeves will only emphasis the bulkiness of your upper arm, wear fluted sleeves as these will act by balancing out the proportions of your arm and making it appear slimmer. Much like bootlegs and flares do for legs.

Three quarter length:

Three quarter length tops are a godsend for bigger arms, they are another top that creates the illusion of slenderness by beginning at the slimmest part of the arm, so it looks as though the arms is that slim all the way up!

Jackets:

Make sure that the sleeves of your jacket are not too tight, they should be loose and come to the point where your wrist meets your hand. If necessary, buy the jacket a little bigger and have it taken in around the waist, most tailors or dressmakers will not charge much for this. If possible, try to get them to let the sleeves out a little, this will create a fluted effect which is very slimming.

Jewelry

Many people with big arms believe they need to have big jewelry in order to balance their arms out, but this is not true, and whilst extremely delicate jewelry may look out of place, all a big bracelet is going to do is make your wrist look big too. Stick to medium sized jewelry, nothing huge.

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