11 Nipple Facts You Need in Your Life

11 Nipple Facts You Need in Your Life



Have you ever looked at your nipples and wondered if they're normal? It turns out, they come in all different shapes and sizes. What's more, they can bring you incredible pleasure, help feed a baby, and even tip you off to some potentially serious health problems. Seriously, they’re amazing. After reading this, we promise you’ll have newfound respect for this body part. Here, everything you need to know about your nipples.

The size of a woman’s nipples and areolas can be as wide as a half-dollar or smaller than a dime, and either way is totally normal, says Alyssa Dweck, M.D., ob-gyn in Westchester, New York and coauthor of V Is for Vagina. Gain weight or get pregnant, and they can balloon even bigger, she says.

Pale pink, brick red, dark brown: Nipple pigment has to do with a woman’s ethnic background and the hue of the rest of her skin. Just as nipple size changes when you have a baby, so does nipple color, and that shift in shade is often permanent. “It’s the result of hormone surges during pregnancy,” says Dweck.

Nipples are an erogenous zone for many women, and a 2011 study from the Journal of Sexual Medicine backs this up. Researchers using MRI imaging found that when nipples are stimulated, a pleasure center inside the brain lights up the same way it lights up after stimulation of the clitoris and vagina.

The same 2011 study that showed a link between nipple stimulation and the pleasure center of the brain also raised the possibility that nipple stimulation alone could result in orgasm, something sex researchers previously estimated that only a “small number” of women could experience.