How many times can you wear a bra before you're that nasty girl?

As you know, I've got an itty bitty closet situation in my post WWII bungalow. Normally, with the season change I do a complete swapout of my summer versus winter clothes, folding and reorging everything during an entire weekend marathon session, but this year, either I've run out of patience or I've finally accumulated too many garments, because I have instead devoted one wall of my bedroom to two gigantic industrial baker's racks and many little steel bins from Ikea. Yes, it looks like I sleep the middle of an Old Navy, but the fact that I no longer have to shove all of my carefully folded tees and jeans up into the single shelf in the closet has been a gigantic improvement in my well-being. (See some of our favorite plus-size fashions.)

While plotting out where I would put what on my side of the racking system, I figured that I'd devote one entire bin to my bras, but when I sorted through them and stacked them all neatly by color, I realized that, er, one basket wasn't enough. In fact, two baskets barely cut it. To think I used to shove them all into a single dresser drawer and then was wondering why the cups were getting mangled!

And while I acknowledge that I have a certain OCD quality wherein I typically match my bra to whatever I'm wearing and therefore, have many colored bras, I was still surprised to see that the beige/black contingent took up an entire giant bin all by themselves. Esteban freaked out and said, "Ok, clearly you don't need to buy bras for, like, a decade."

Granted, I do let the laundry build up sometimes, but why does it always seem like whenever I'm a little behind, I run out of bras first? Am I weird that I typically wear a bra once, let it hang out and "rest" for at least a day and then wear it again, then typically pitch it? Or does everyone else have as many bras as they do panties? If I had to guess, I'd say that my bra to panty ratio is something like 1:4, but it might be something like 1:10, because I've never counted either. (Find out why underwear is now optional.)

So here's my question: how often do you wear a bra before you wash it? Do you ditch it into the wash immediately after wearing? Do you wear it once, let it rest/air out for a 24 hour period and then wear it again? Do you put it back in the drawer and only wash it when it starts getting funky in the boob pit area? And if you had to guess, how many bras do you own?

Related: I like to go braless in the summer. Will I sag by September?

MORE FROM WEETABIX ANDSELF:

• Gossip Girl and the sneaky commentary about weight
• Secrets of America's Healthiest Women!
• SELF's survey of 100 of the largest U.S. metro areas reveals the fittest, healthiest and happiest women in the land.
  
• Sensa-tional ingredient information from the folks at Sensa
• Subscribe to Self for less than $1 an issue. Get a FREE Healthy Recipe Book download!