Horizontal stripes really do make you look fat

​It's not just your imagination. A 53-year-old woman named Val Watham just won the BBC's Amateur Scientist of the Year award with an experiment proving that wearing horizontal stripes truly does make people look bigger. Watham set out to refute a 2008 study, based on two-dimensional drawings, concluding that horizontal stripes made people look thinner. Watham asked 500 people to watch videos of real-life models wearing various striped attire; the viewers were asked to rate how tall and wide they looked. People rated models in horizontal stripes as the widest, vertical stripes as the tallest, and all-black outfits as the thinnest. Start pruning your wardrobe now.