Are skinny jeans bad for you?

A good reason not to lament wearing your fat jeans this morning: According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, skinny jeans may look good, but wearing them may come with a handful of unanticipated health effects. There’s even a medical term to describe what you’re feeling when you’re strutting your zipped-up stuff: Tight Pants Syndrome.

What’s the problem with wearing pants so tight they could be mistaken for body paint? Nerve compression, heartburn, abdominal discomfort and numbness are a few side effects mentioned in the piece. The article also proposes a link between skinny jeans, lower back pain, yeast infections and belching. Good times.

Unfortunately, the only cure for Tight Pants Syndrome is the swift removal of the offending pants and immediate application of an elastic waistband.

The WSJ also identified earrings and neckties as being closet wardrobe staples with a dark side (for the full list, see the article here). The WSJ cited a study by dermatologists that found nearly 20 percent of body piercings develop a bacterial infection. If your partner or friend is complaining about blurry vision or headaches, he may need to loosen his tie and go up a size in dress shirts. The WSJ reports that far too many men are wearing shirt collars that don’t fit, which when you add a tie can cause a range of symptoms from headaches to tingly ears.

Skinny jeans, neckties and earrings aren’t the only sartorial bad guys, suggests a recent post on Time.com. Ladies who favour wearing the much maligned ‘granny panty’ over saucier styles may smugly cross their arms (over their high, wide waistbands) when they discover what the sexier thong gets up to in the dark.

In fact, gross doesn’t quite cover what’s wrong with the thong.

According to Time.com, the seams on thong underwear may chafe the skin around those sensitive private areas, priming these precious spots for fungal growth and bacterial infections. Wear a thong with skinny jeans and you may exacerbate the chafing effect.