Everyone’s got his own unique set of aesthetic sensibilities and ideal vision of beauty. In general, though, guys like looking at half-naked women, and when they aren’t in a position to look at one, they’ll settle for imagining them.

As such, it’s perfectly natural and healthy to fantasize about women wearing sexy lingerie if you’re a young man who’s reached the age of puberty (or if you’re an older man whose mind didn’t really progress that far afterwards). But when you start coming up with systems to determine what kind of lingerie a woman has on, like theorizing that it matches her umbrella, well, you might be thinking about women in their undies just a bit too much.

In a display of either a sad lack of independent imagination or a very unusual attempted application of psychology, there’s a rumor floating around the Japanese Internet claiming when you see a woman carrying an umbrella, its color and pattern matches the lingerie she’s got on. The knee-jerk reaction is to see this as some kind of sexy version of the Santa Claus story, in that it doesn’t sound logical at all, but you can understand that some people just really want to believe, such as these online commenters in Japan.

“Since someone told me about the rumor, when I see a woman walking with a black lace umbrella, I start to fantasize.”

“This might just be a baseless Internet rumor, but if it’s, it means that women are essentially walking around town holding up placards that say, ‘This is the kind of underwear I have on!’”

“I don’t know how true it is, but I love the idea. It’s good to have dreams. And scary.”

Basic common sense immediately pokes a few holes in this underwear hypothesis. For starters, the real world is a little different from a softcore porno or late-night panty-flashing anime, and as heartbreaking as it may be for some guys to accept, most women have little to no interest in coquettishly announcing their lingerie choices through a semi-secret code to amplify male daydreaming enjoyment. There’s also the fact that while a fashionable individual may have two or three different umbrellas to coordinate with different sets of clothing, any woman is going to own far more sets of lingerie than umbrellas. Assuming she’s not buying the exact same bras and panties in bulk, the greater variety of lingerie styles she has to choose from means the odds of an exact match to her umbrella on any given day are pretty low.

But surprisingly, it seems there’s more to this theory than the pervy male mind getting excited and overclocking until it fries itself and spits out gibberish. As the online debate about the theory’s accuracy continues, a few women have come forward claiming that it’s not entirely off base.

▼ “It’s not always true, but it’s not always wrong (I only have one pair that matches this, though).

“Come to think of it, I do like floral prints for both,” mused another woman, which lends credibility to another theory that holds there’s a subconscious, inexact connection between umbrella and underwear choice. Given the fact that most people don’t own a huge variety of umbrellas, it makes sense that each one they own is going to get used regularly when it rains, and so shoppers will naturally gravitate towards colors, patterns, and general motifs that they like.

At the very least, someone with a lacy pink umbrella likes girlish looks, and someone with a leopard-print one isn’t afraid of making a bold fashion statement. This less strict theory proposes that if someone is more likely to choose, say, shoes, in her favorite color, might the same hold true when selecting an umbrella, and again when picking out her panties for the day? Phrased another way, it’s not necessarily that the woman is currently wearing underwear that’s an exact match with the umbrella she’s carrying, but just that there’s a better chance of that than any other specific type of lingerie.

This, however, leaves the problem of how to interpret the undergarment attitude of a woman who’s carrying one of the clear plastic umbrellas sold at convenience stores and 100-yen shops.

Some say that’s a sign that the woman doesn’t put much thought at all into her lingerie, and that she’s either wearing something hopelessly unsexy or a mismatched bra and panties. Others choose to go with the steamier conclusion that she’s not wearing anything at all beneath her clothes, while still others argue that a clear umbrella means the bearer’s underwear is similarly and scandalously see-through.

In the end, though, it may not matter to most men whether or not this panty-predicting protocol is accurate or not, as many expressed they simply use it as a technique to brighten their mood during the gloomy rainy season that descends on Japan each June. They might want to keep their fantasies from showing on their faces, though, lest they get hit over the head with those same umbrellas that they’re using as fodder for their rainy day pick-me-up.

Source: Naver Matome
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert image: Pakutaso